I tried installing VNC over the weekend and ran into difficulty. I’m running the stable release of Debian 3.0 (Woody), so I went ahead and pulled that package version of vncserver.
(BTW, it’s been said a million times before, but I don’t think I’ve raved about it yet. apt-get is really amazing. It’s definitely one area where this particular linux distribution has Windows beat in ease of use.)
Anyway, back to VNC. Everything installed like a dream as usual, but upon trying to run vncserver, I got “~/.vnc : No such file or directory”. Hmmm, a directory listing showed that the directory had, in fact been created and seemed to have usable permissions. I also tried vncpasswd with the same result.
Frustrated, I searched the VNC user mailing list, found a mention of similar problems, but no solution. I subscribed and posted my question with as much info as I could provide, hoping someone would help out. While I slept, a helpful user named CeBee from the Netherlands gave me the solution. Apparently, something is messed up in the vncserver script on Debian and it doesn’t correctly check for the .vnc directory. It’s necessary to run vncpasswd.real to set the password for your vnc session and then vncserver will start without problems.
An answer in less than 12 hours. The Internet and the community built up around open source software still manage to amaze me sometimes.