Re: [gentoo-user] NX, FreeNX, Neatx, x2go?

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Paul Hartman writes:

> On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 8:43 AM, Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>
> wrote:
> > What would be the best solution? What do you prefer?
> 
> I haven't tried FreeNX, x2go or NeatX or any of those, but I'm using
> nxserver-freeedition for years and using the official NX Client to
> connect from remote machines (Linux and Windows). All of the features
> work such as session suspending and resuming. I use public key login
> on my machine and there was some trick to getting it working
> initially. (I don't remember, but if you search for my name and
> nxserver in this list's archives there should be a message about it
> somewhere.)
> 
> I think that the other NX clients, such as QtNX, or things based on
> libnxcl, usually only work to connect into a FreeNX server and not
> with the official NX servers. Ideally I think the nx client version
> should match the nx server version for best results.

I'm also using using nxclient from nomachine.org.

I only tried nxserver-freeedition on an Ubuntu server where I had some 
trouble running FreeNX. It worked well first, but then I started getting 
some errors about a wrong 'bsize' or something. Ususally a few retries later 
I can connect, but at the moment I can't. I did not investigate this further 
yet because there are other servers in that LAN than I can use instead.

FreeNX is now working on my new machine. First I had to emerge xterm, which 
was the custom command I wanted to execute. Stupid error, but a message that 
the command could not be found would have been nice.
And then I had to change the DISPLAY_BASE in node.conf. Looks like when 
running multiple instances of nxclient those values have to be different.

That was with Windows XP. Now I tried to connect from my Linux Desktop, and 
got an error about the display :1043. I set it back to the default of :1000, 
and it works again.
...
So it looks like when runing multiple clients, their servers need to have 
different displays. Additionally, there is a timing problem, a workaround is 
to add a sleep 4 in /usr/bin/nxnode right before the xrdb starts. I found 
this tip somewhere on the web, noone added such a patch yet, probably 
because FreeNX is dead.

> nxclient contains a whole X server, which is really not necessary if
> the client machine is already running X. Ultimately if your client has
> X and ssh already, you just need nxproxy. Connect to server and run
> nxagent and have a working session (there are shell scripts to do this
> on platforms who have X but not nxclient, such as ARM). But you won't
> get any of the special features like suspending and resuming,
> printing, sound, etc.

I never used sound or printing, although it might be nice. But 
suspending/resuming sessions is really cool. I often run nxclient from my 
Windows Notebook in the living room to run stuff on my linux desktop, and I 
can shut down the notebook in between if I like.

Thanks for your input. I will consider nxserver-freeedition for the next 
time I set up this stuff. FreeNX is dead, and I read that it is also a 
genrally a little slower than the nomachine version. x2go looks not yet 
ready, but I think I'll also try it when the next version arrives and I have 
some spare time to paly around with.

	Wonko