Vinagre displays terminal of remote computer, how do I display the desktop instead?

Question

I'm having problems displaying a remote desktop in vinagre, I'm using a Mint 20.3 computer to connect to a Debian 11 (xfce desktop) computer on my home network. I can get an ssh connection fine and access the machine by terminal, but I can't get a desktop interface through vinagre.

I start the server on the remote machine with tigervncserver -xstartup /usr/bin/xterm , then make an ssh connection on the local machine using ssh -L 5901:127.0.0.1:5901 remoteusername@ip. Then I use vinagre localhost:1, which brings up a password dialogue, pop in the password then I see a terminal in vinagre connected to the remote machine. Meanwhile, in the local terminal it prints loads of stuff, all prefixed with Gtk-WARNING, here's a sample:

(vinagre:7975): Gtk-WARNING **: 23:55:42.241: Theme parsing error: <data>:2:28: The style property GtkButton:default-border is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version


(vinagre:7975): Gtk-WARNING **: 23:55:42.636: Drawing a gadget with negative dimensions. Did you forget to allocate a size? (node box owner ViewAutoDrawer)

My xstartup file reads:

#!/bin/bash
xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
startxfce4 &

I'm following the tutorial at this link and I'm stuck at step 4: https://computingforgeeks.com/install-and-configure-tigervnc-vnc-server-on-debian/

Answer 1

I solved this by uninstalling tigervnc on the host and installing tightvnc instead. I then edited xstartup to read:

#!/bin/bash
xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
unset SESSION_MANAGER
unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
startxfce4 &

Then, ssh as before from the client:

ssh -L 5901:127.0.0.1:5901  remoteusername@ip

Start the vnc server on the host (with screen res specified):

vncserver -geometry 1280x1024

Finally start vinagre on the client:

vinagre localhost:1

Enter the password then done! Worked for me anyway, please comment if you have any solutions to get tigervnc going, I couldn't get it working properly.