TigerVNC Server & Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus

Today I tried to install TigerVNC Server on Ubuntu 16.04, and was surprised to find that Ubuntu still uses TightVNC in their main repos. Additionally, there are no PPAs for TigerVNC and Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus yet.

Installing it is simple:

Download the latest binary from TigerVNC. At the time of writing, version 1.7.0 for Ubuntu is located here for 64bit and here for x86. Latest release information can be found on the TigerVNC github page.

Then run:

sudo dpkg -i tigervncserver_filename.deb

sudo apt-get install -f

vncserver

You will be prompted for a few questions the first time you start it up, but that it is it. Your VNC Server is up and running on port 5901 by default. You can connect to it using the Tiger VNC viewer on another computer by pointing it to the IP:5901.

There are a lot of options for TigerVNC server, but one of my favorite things about TigerVNC is that the connections are encrypted by default. However, I recommend only connecting to VNC servers over VPNs or SSH tunnels just to be sure.