X11vnc not working after upgrade to Fedora 38

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1

I had x11vnc running on Fedora 37 Kinoite but after rebasing to 38 it’s not working

I have been using the following systemd service to start x11vnc

[Unit]
Description=Start x11vnc at startup.
After=multi-user.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=500
StartLimitBurst=5

[Service]
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=2s
ExecStart=/bin/sh -c "/usr/bin/x11vnc -allow 100. -allow fd7a:115c:a1e0:ab12:4843:cd96: -ncache 10 -ncache_cr -noxdamage -xkb -norepeat -noxrecord -display :0 -auth /var/run/sddm/* -rfbauth /home/aaylnx/.vnc/passwd -rfbport 5900"
ExecStop=/usr/bin/killall x11vnc

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

After upgrading to Fedora 38 on Kinoite x11vnc will start up fine initially, but whenever I try to log in the service fails.

If I run sudo journalctl -u x11vnc

I get the following

Nov 15 19:45:25 gandalf systemd[1]: Started x11vnc.service - Start x11vnc at startup..  
Nov 15 19:45:25 gandalf sh[1277]: 15/11/2022 19:45:25 passing arg to libvncserver: -rfbauth  
Nov 15 19:45:25 gandalf sh[1277]: 15/11/2022 19:45:25 passing arg to libvncserver: /home/aaylnx/.vnc/passwd  
Nov 15 19:45:25 gandalf sh[1277]: 15/11/2022 19:45:25 passing arg to libvncserver: -rfbport  
Nov 15 19:45:25 gandalf sh[1277]: 15/11/2022 19:45:25 passing arg to libvncserver: 5900  
Nov 15 19:45:25 gandalf sh[1277]: 15/11/2022 19:45:25 x11vnc version: 0.9.16 lastmod: 2019-01-05  pid: 1277  
Nov 15 19:45:25 gandalf sh[1277]: 15/11/2022 19:45:25 XOpenDisplay(":0") failed.  
Nov 15 19:45:25 gandalf sh[1277]: 15/11/2022 19:45:25 Trying again with XAUTHLOCALHOSTNAME=localhost ...  
Nov 15 19:45:25 gandalf sh[1277]: 15/11/2022 19:45:25 ***************************************  
Nov 15 19:45:25 gandalf sh[1277]: 15/11/2022 19:45:25 *** XOpenDisplay failed (:0)  
Nov 15 19:45:25 gandalf sh[1277]: *** x11vnc was unable to open the X DISPLAY: ":0", it cannot continue.  
Nov 15 19:45:25 gandalf sh[1277]: *** There may be "Xlib:" error messages above with details about the failure.

If I rebase back to F37 everything seems to work fine. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

2

On a clean F38 install, I could not make the service work, either.
I got it resolved by using Gnome Tweaks and added x11vnc as an autostart application. This on each login will open the GUI for configuration which I did not want, therefore I modifed the file .config/autostart/x11vnc.desktop and replaced the “Exec” line as follow:

#Exec=x11vnc -gui tray=setpass -rfbport PROMPT -bg -o %%HOME/.x11vnc.log.%%VNCDISPLAY
Exec=/usr/bin/x11vnc -auth /run/user/1000/gdm/Xauthority -nopw -ncache 10 -forever -noxdamage -repeat -shared -o %%HOME/.x11vnc.log.%%VNCDISPLAY

Note, I deliberateliy wanted no password, hence the -nopw argument