Misleading instructions in Remote Desktop (vino-preferences) settings panel on Hardy
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
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vino (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
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Wishlist
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Unassigned |
Bug Description
I'm running 8.04 (Hardy Heron) 32-bit desktop edition with all the latest updates as of 6th June, 2008 @ 12:28.
This is obviously very minor from a technical standpoint and presumably requires merely updating a simple message string, but it's just the kind of thing that confuses and disheartens new users (and makes them think that Ubuntu doesn't "Just work").
When a user enables the "Allow others to view your desktop" option within the vino-preferences dialog box (System > Preferences > Remote Desktop), the instruction:
Users can view your desktop using this command:
vncviewer [host_name]:0
is revealed.
With Hardy now using Vinagre as its remote viewer the command "vncviewer" is no longer available by default (requiring the manual installation of xvnc4viewer, or alternative package). Unwitting users will be attempting to run the suggested command only to be presented with an error message when they do so. Moreover, it seems that Vinagre requires the host name suffixed with the TCP/IP port number (e.g. :5900), and not the VNC session number (e.g. :0). Finally, it might be more helpful to those new to networking if the IP address rather than the host name were used in the example command. For those using static addressing, the former will only work if there is a corresponding entry in the hosts file.
Apart from these things the example command string is fine as it is ;-)
Further to my report above...
I should acknowledge that the example command in the Remote Desktop preferences will (of course) only be inappropriate for remote clients that do not have the "vncviewer" command available by default, such as Hardy Heron. For earlier versions of Ubuntu (and, I assume, certain other distros), the example command will still be valid.