[FreeNX-kNX] Easy even with Murphy

[Matt Grab]

I setup FreeNX yesterday.  My plan was to do a presentation at my local LUG on 
NX/FreeNX.  Since I waited till the last minute, one would expect Murphy's 
Law to interfere with my installation.  It did, but only with my internet 
access, and my presentation notebook not working with the projector.
But setting up FreeNX worked like a charm.

Here is what I had.
I had a kubuntu server, running hoary, and it was updated about a week or 2 
ago.
In order to install FreeNX, this is what I did.

I had to add the ubuntu backports repository.  I had to choose a mirror and 
get it added to my /etc/sources.list properly.

During the apt-get install, it asked me whether I wanted to use my own keys, 
or nomachine's.  I chose nomachine's, since I was planning on using their 
binary client.
This installed NXserver 1.4.0-03 OS (GPL).

Then I did a useradd, and a passwd change.  (Later I read that useradd isn't 
necessary but I didn't test that).

Since my demo location restricted port 22, I had to setup my server's SSH to 
listen or port 443 as well, and I had to port forward the router to send 
inbound 22 & 443 to the freeNX server.


At one of my test sites, I downloaded, and installed the windows binary client 
from nomachine - 1.5.0-103.  I told it to connect, and to SSL encrypt all 
traffic (it didn't work without SSL encrypting it).  It worked just fine.

At the demo location, I used 2 gentoo boxes.  I did an emerge freenx (or was 
it emerge nxclient).  After I found the path to the binary (which wasn't in 
the user's path), I ran it and was presented with the list of previously 
suspended sessions.
It worked great.

The only thing that didn't work was resuming suspended sessions.  I'm not sure 
why, but I didn't bother to debug it.

This was a very painless exercise.  I have tried NX before, but it was much 
more difficult to setup in the past (although it did work).  It's great to 
see that NX has been adopted by the distros.  As distributions get the NX 
installations painless, there will be a lot less questions about 
installation, and a lot more people will start using NX, and it will start 
replacing VNC - except where people need to access Windows clients.

One of the people at my presentation said that at his job he was considering 
rolling out Windows Terminal Services for remote users.  But now that he saw 
my demo, he really wanted to see the commercially supported version.  I told 
him that the commercial version has powerful management features, which I'm 
sure he needs, and it has support, which I'm sure is valuable to his 
organization.  I wasn't sure if it supported shadowing of other sessions, he 
said that was pretty important.

All in all, it was an excellent demo, and the response was very positive.  And 
for me, the demo couldn't have been any easier.  Well, it could have been if 
I had brought my own laptop.

I hope to be able to deploy this at my job once the remote users have need to 
access linux sessions.

Thanks to NoMachine, and to the freeNX community.


Matt Grab

ps - if you didn't know, Murphy's Law is "if anything can go wrong, it will".  
It's also been said that Murphy has other laws, for example "If you drop a 
piece of bread that has peanut butter on it, the side that lands face down 
will be the side that has peanut butter, but only if the floor is carpeted".