Remotely enable remote desktop on Debian

Submitted by hemanth on Sat, 03/10/2012 - 11:12

It so happened, as I was working from home last Friday, box there at office had only ssh enabled, but was in need of remote desktop badly [ But default it's not enabled ].

Below is the simple script that one needs to run on the box, after ssh to enable remote desktop connection remotely i.e via SSH :

# Set appropriately, assuming 0 here
display=0

# Need the machine-id
read -r machineid < /var/lib/dbus/machine-id

# source the .dbus for the required variables
. "$HOME/.dbus/session-bus/$machineid-$display"

# export the variables sourced above
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID \
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_WINDOWID

# Enable remote access
gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled true

# Disable prompt one connection.
gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/prompt_enabled false

# Disable view only.
gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/view_only false

After which any vnc client would help us to connect to the box and later the permission can be changed as per the need. Happy hacking! :)

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