Black screen when trying to run (Tiger)VNC with Gnome under Fedora 30

I have seen variants of this issue logged all over the place, but none of the reported solutions seem to work for me. I am running Fedora 30 as a client under VMWware ESXi and want to access the client using VNC, with Gnome being my preferred desktop. I am using TigerVNC on both ends.

I have installed TigerVNC-server on my client and opened the firewall. I have started the server using:

vncserver :1

And my ~/.vnc/xstartup file is as shown below:

#!/bin/sh
export XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE=1
unset SESSION_MANAGER
unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
gnome-panel &
gnome-settings-daemon &
metacity &
nautilus &
gnome-terminal &
# extra stuff
export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP="GNOME-Flashback:GNOME"
export XDG_MENU_PREFIX="gnome-flashback-"

My Gnome is V3.32.2. Note that the above is but one of several variants that I have found and tried - all with equal lack of success :-(

Does anybody have a working solution?

1 Answer

I finally got it working by changing the --session type to gnome-classic. So my working startup file is now as shown below:

#!/bin/sh
export XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE=1
unset SESSION_MANAGER
unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP="GNOME-Flashback:GNOME"
export XDG_MENU_PREFIX="gnome-flashback-"
gnome-session --session=gnome-classic --disable-acceleration-check &

Once I made this change it became clear that the checkboxes that I had seen previously were actually the dialog for the VNCConfig application.