These distributions ship with out-of-the-box support for automated VNC servers. Specifically this section was tested on Fedora Core 2. Firstly you must ensure the vnc-server package has been installed (for FC2 this is called vnc-server-4.0-1.beta4.11). You should also ensure you can run the vncserver correctly using your normal user code (this allows you to select the session password). VNCSERVERS="1:drt" VNCSERVERARGS[1]="-geometry 1280x1024" The VNC session will be available to a VNC viewer as :1