Start a VNC Server on Ubuntu on Boot Ubuntu makes many things easy. For example, with Gnome, it's very simple to set up remote access to your desktop with the included Vino application. The only problem is that to get the VNC server running, you have to be logged in! Luckily, it's not too difficult to create a script which starts up the server as soon as your system boots. This is especially handy if you are running a headless server, or are using the primary display for other purposes. In this case, my server runs MythTV on the normal X server connected to my TV, but starts up Azureus and K3B in a VNC session so I can access them without bothering those watching TV. To set it up, follow these steps: First, install the TightVNC server. This VNC server has excellent compatibility with clients, and provides reasonable compression for slow networks. It can be installed with Synaptic, or with sudo aptitude install tightvncserver . Set up the VNC server for the user you wish to log in as. When you run "vncserver" for the first time, it will ask you to set a password. VNC authentication is not the strongest encryption available, so be sure to firewall your server from all but trusted machines. Better yet, deny direct access to VNC and only allow SSH tunnelled or VPN connections. To launch programs or a session when your VNC session starts, modify ~/.vnc/xstartup . Here is my copy of