Earlier this year, I wrote a blog post detailing how to set up VNC on a Fedora 12 Box and connect to it from a Windows VNC client securely over the Internet. The original article is here.

The steps to setting up VNC on RHEL 5.5 and CentOS 5.5 are very similar, with one important difference. In my previous post’s “Step 3: Configure the VNC Desktop Environment and Password,” when you edit the /home/username/.vnc/xstartup file, you need to uncomment two lines near the top of the file so that it reads:

# Uncomment the following two lines for normal desktop:
unset SESSION_MANAGER
exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

After uncommenting those two lines, go to the bottom of the file and comment out the twm & line, then add a line that tells VNC to start GNOME desktop. The last two lines should read:

# twm &
startx &

That’s it! Now just continue following the instructions in my original post and you’ll be able to set up your RHEL 5.5 / CentOS 5.5 box to accept VNC connections securely.