I have a droplet on Digital ocean. I can access the ubuntu's GUI from there just fine. I can ssh from putty. However, I can't make this gray screen go away when accessing from VNC. I have tigervnc installed. Tested different xstartup settings from Ubuntu 16, 18 and now 20. Nothing works except for xfce4. I tried almost all the solutions from this community to no avail for gnome. Here's my xtartup:
#!/bin/sh
[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
vncconfig -iconic &
dbus-launch --exit-with-session gnome-session &
xsetroot -solid grey
x-window-manager &
gnome-panel &
gnome-settings-daemon &
metacity &
nautilus &
Here's my screenshot: Screenshot
I tried adding gnome-session-flashback after installing it, but then the vnc doesn't connect. I don't want xfce4, as I never encountered these issues 2 years back with gnome. And it was too easy to setup a vncserver with a gui. Please help me it's been 2 days of constant trying. Thanks.
UPDATE
So I got the following xstartup working a bit further:
#!/bin/sh
[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
x-terminal-emulator -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP="GNOME-Flashback:GNOME"
export XDG_MENU_PREFIX="gnome-flashback-"
gnome-session --session=gnome-flashback-metacity --disable-acceleration-check &
