Now, I love me some Ubuntu. I also love me some Beryl. Sure the drivers can be a bit flaky, but I live with it. It’s a fantastic little app, makes using my computer more “fun” and also adds some more functionality to my sessions.
Up until now, I could never figure out how to get Beryl working while inside a VNC session. The screen would just freeze. Lurking around and checking out the many options, I found a solution that just plain works.
My method may seem a bit more simplistic than yours, but it can be mashed up into different methods (running it as a service, adding in a password, etc etc). Please note that I’m not using the built-in VNC function (aka vino) built into GNOME, for I am using XFCE – not to mention I’ve found vino to actually be a slower VNC server than this.
All you need to do is install x11vnc and run it from a console.
sherl0k@bakerstreet:~$ sudo apt-get install x11vnc
sherl0k@bakerstreet:~$ x11vnc -noxdamage
I SSH into home from school/work, and I don’t keep port 5900 open so I tunnel the port. This way, using a password is pointless (since 5900 can’t be reached from the outside). So every time I need to VNC into home, I just SSH in, run x11vnc with the -noxdamage option, and I get full Beryl functionality from within my VNC viewer.
If you want to get fancy and keep x11vnc running as a service, there’s a nice guide on the Ubuntu forums that will give you the step-by-step process. Just make sure that -noxdamage argument is added onto the “server_args” line.