Adopt an ebuild: VNC 4.1.1

Martigen · n00b Joined: 04 Mar 2003 Posts: 59

The current version of VNC in portage is 4.0. The official 4.1.1 release has been out for so long now it might as have been formed in the Jurassic period.

Various requests for an updated ebuild have been made in bugzilla: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86520

Unfortunately, the original maintainer has disappeared and no one else has taken up the reigns.

And doubly unfortunately, my attempts to take up the reigns have failed. The new version uses a different structure and my experience isn't enough to get it compiling within its own source tree, let alone with an ebuild.

Hence this post. If some talented, kind, supremely sexy soul would like to adopt VNC and create an up-to-date ebuild you'll have the thanks of at least one Gentooer, and I promise there's a beer in it for you if you live in Australia!

Mart

tost · Guru Joined: 10 Dec 2005 Posts: 503 Location: Germany

I agree with most of you´ve said and you´re definitely right.

But is there no alternative software we can use instead of the original VNC ?
Does no other compatible package exist in portage ? I can´t believe this.

tost

You´ll get a beer too, if you live in Germany
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Martigen · n00b Joined: 04 Mar 2003 Posts: 59

Tightvnc is in portage but where once it performed better than VNC, VNC 4.0 is a tad faster and 4.1.1 is reportedly vastly faster and more efficient than 4.0. Being unale to install it (even getting its source tree to compile) I can't actually verify this!

panchonb · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2006 Posts: 28

With the ebuild and patches from this bug report, I was able to build 4.1.1 with GCC 3.4.5.

Hopefully this will get added to portage.

iamben · Apprentice Joined: 10 May 2004 Posts: 216

builds fine under gcc 3.4.5 here too, im on x86. finally we can set some options in the vncviewer gui.

oh and for what its worth, it does NOT build under gcc 4.1.0-pre20060223

panchonb · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2006 Posts: 28

jekyll · n00b Joined: 07 Mar 2006 Posts: 63

panchonb · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2006 Posts: 28

iamben · Apprentice Joined: 10 May 2004 Posts: 216

i went ahead and made an overlay w/ 4.1.1 & the patch panchonb posted, you can get it here: http://bkohler.net/ebuilds/vnc-4.1.1-overlay.tar.gz

builds great under gnu-4.1.0-pre20060223 here, thanks for the fix

panchonb · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2006 Posts: 28

jekyll · n00b Joined: 07 Mar 2006 Posts: 63

cuicui · Apprentice Joined: 17 Dec 2004 Posts: 208

VNC-4.1.1 / X6.8.x works for me too, thanks.

Any trick to keep it installed even after a "--sync" or a "--depclean" ? I'm not familiar with homemade ebuilds...

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 6609

iamben · Apprentice Joined: 10 May 2004 Posts: 216

edit: nm, this was my mistake!

scourage · Posted: Mon Apr 10, 2006 7:12 pm Post subject:

Is there a way to use VNC with the modular xorg?

Cheers,

Bob
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warren64c · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2006 Posts: 15

I have been unable to get either real vnc or tightvnc to work with modular x. I had a working tightvnc install before the modular x change. Any ideas?

panchonb · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2006 Posts: 28

warren64c · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2006 Posts: 15

With tightvnc, when I type "vncviewer localhost:70" I get a message saying "vncviewer: VNC server closed connection".

With realvnc, I get a connection using that same command and then it asks for a password. After establishing a password using vncpasswd, it will not authenticate.

It seems in both issues something has changed from a security standpoint once I moved to modular x, but I am not sure what.

I have done the obvious, checked the xinetd.conf file, restarted xinetd.

Any ideas?

panchonb · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2006 Posts: 28

[edit] I just noticed that the source tar ball has been added to the realvnc website. I just modified the ebuild and it works. All I did was copy the 4.1.1 ebuild and change the vnc file name. I also had to copy the patches in the files directory to a vnc-4.1.2 directory. [/edit]

Just a heads up.

It looks like there is a pretty major security vulnerability in VNC 4.1.1. RealVNC has created a patch to fix it, but I cannot find the source tar ball for it. All they provide at this point is binaries.

I have been up unable to get these to work correctly, but I have not tried more than 15 minutes or so.

Info can be found here and here.

Unfortunately, this only affects 4.1.x. That means that since Gentoo hasn't updated from VNC 4.0.0, we are SOL. I submitted a bug, but it was "resolved" as "we are not affected". This might be true, but it would be nice to get an updated version of VNC into portage.

This also means that 4.1.x will probably never get into portage, unless RealVNC releases a source tar ball for 4.1.2 or higher in the future.

jekyll · n00b Joined: 07 Mar 2006 Posts: 63

panchonb · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2006 Posts: 28

boroshan · l33t Joined: 16 Apr 2003 Posts: 730 Location: upside down

electrofreak · l33t Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 713 Location: Ohio, USA

jekyll · n00b Joined: 07 Mar 2006 Posts: 63

After upgrading to modular X, I could not get aterm to work inside a new vncserver session (not using the vnc.so module, which still works fine). Error messages reported that color were missing. I finally found what the problem is, which results from files being moved around in modular X. Xvnc looks for rgb.txt in the wrong directory. A symlink fixes the problem. See the topic here. The fix is at the end of the message.

jekyll · n00b Joined: 07 Mar 2006 Posts: 63