I just got around to doing a clean Xubuntu install on cumine, a 550 MHz Pentium III box that just inherited 512 Mbytes of RAM from my test rig, which failed noisily.
Xubuntu is a Linux distribution that comes with a tweaked Xfce desktop. It comes from the nice people at the Ubuntu project and is comparable to Ubuntu, which comes with the GNOME desktop and Kubuntu, which comes with KDE. I have another box with Ubuntu Server, which comes by default without a GUI desktop environment. Clearly these Ubuntu people value choice!
Xubuntu is normally used from the console: the keyboard, mouse and display that are attached to the computer. For various reasons I want to be able to use it from elsewhere: from the iBook in the comfy chair, from a Windows machine at work or wherever.
I installed the vnc4server package, which creates a "fake" X server in memory and makes it viewable from any VNC viewer. I use vncviewer on BSD and Linux, 'Chicken of the VNC' on MacOS X and RealVNC on MS Windows machines.
To make Xubuntu's Xfce desktop available via VNC though, I had to edit my .vnc/xstartup file to include...
xfdesktop&...and comment out a few other lines, including the one that would have otherwise launched twm. vnc4server's X server has some limitations, but it does most of what I need for now.
xfwm4&
xfce4-panel
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