Listening VNC Viewer

Question

I'm trying to run Real VNC Viewer in listening mode on my pi so that I can do a reverse connection from a PC. The docs say vncviewer -listen 5500 should work, but I get the following errors:

<11> 2017-05-19T19:49:14.713Z raspberrypi vncviewer[2765]: vncviewer: unable to open display ""
<11> 2017-05-19T19:49:14.714Z raspberrypi vncviewer[2765]: TXMsgBox: unable to open display ""
<11> 2017-05-19T19:49:14.714Z raspberrypi vncviewer[2765]: TXMsgBox: unable to open display ""

I've googled around some but haven't found anything useful. Can I run vncviewer in listening mode on a raspberry pi and if so what is the command?

Answer 1

The error message means that the vncviewer application is unable to talk to the X display. vncviewer is a graphical application and needs to run within an X desktop, so you should run this command from a terminal within a desktop session.

Reasons why you might be seeing this are if you are trying to run this command from the console or from an ssh session.