your xstartup file: unset SESSION_MANAGER exec sh /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc However, I (as well as others) am experiencing theme-switching. The theme-chooser will very shortly change the theme, but when I stop using the chooser itself it refers back to the default icon/theme appearance. Anyone got an idea/link? For five users, it's probably easiest just to copy the init.d script for each user, and modify the USER variable. Or, for a little more robustness, turn that variable into a list of users sourced from a configuration file, and loop over each user for the start and stop actions. That's rather strange. I'm currently running 9.04, and I'm pretty sure that 8.10 loaded the session fine (though I only had 8.10 installed for a few hours). You're sure you ran sudo update-rc.d vncserver defaults ? There should be symlinks in the following locations: Thanks for this write-up. I have followed all the steps but cannot get "sudo /etc/init.d/vncserver start" to work. It returns: "/bin/sh: Illegal option -". I am running Ubuntu 9.10. I have created the script twice but it does not solve the problem. Even if I reduce the script to e.g. only the first 5 lines, it returns the same error. Manually (via command "/usr/bin/vncserver -name my-vnc-server -depth 24 -geometry 1280x1024 :1") I get it to work without problems and can connect. Any idea? Thanks. This works perfectly, except that once Im into the desktop, it seems to think I have a German or french keyboard, instead of a british. any way