[FreeNX-kNX] !M NX on Ubuntu and wishlist environment variables at startup.

[Kurt Pfeifle]

On Wednesday 31 August 2005 02:09, Nicholas Lee wrote:

> On 8/30/05, Gian Filippo Pinzari <pinzari at nomachine.com> wrote:
> > In my experience !M is at least as simple as FreeNX. The difference
> 
> apt-get install freenx is pretty hard to beat.

Very true.

Very true, if the installation works afterwards...

But it doesnt in all cases. It seduces people to not use the easiest
setup (using the NoMachine pub key), but to rather create a custom
key pair. And from that point on, users are lost, in case they didnt
care to closely read the instructions.

There are a few other issues, which can turn into obstacles with the
FreeNX installation that users on their own are unable to overcome.

Also, look at the FreeNX Knowledge Base (http://freenx.berlios.de/kb/)
and at the NoMachine one (http://www.nomachine.com/kb/). Compare them.
Do you see that the FreeNX one is essentially non-existent? Did you
notice how often we point FreeNX users to consult the NoMachine KB?
Did you ever read the /topic in the #nx IRC channel?

Overall, I think that the NoMachine installation routine is still more
easy to handle, at least for all non-Debian distros, and that the !M
NX server product is more mature than our FreeNX version. And looking
at the (still beta) NX Manager Suite, in a commercial/professional
environment, being the responsible IT manager, I'll be more comfortable
to use the NoMachine version, and will happily pay for license and
support. 

FreeNX IMHO essentially is for geeks' private use, and for geeks and 
very knowledgabe Unix/Linux people who happen to bee sys and net admins
for their employers.

To cure you from that false illusion that FreeNX may have solved all 
installation problems, I invite you to...

a) ...monitor the #nx IRC channel and this mailing list for users
      whose FreeNX installation does not work out of the box. (If 
      you want, ignore all non-Debian users).

b) ...help write the FreeNX Knowledge Base and documentation (not
      just a cheap blog entry here and there that no-one will find
      other than by much Googling effort), one that really is of
      good quality. There is too much crappy and incomplete and
      outmoded "personal" web pages out there pretending to be some
      sort of FreeNX documentation.

Do not misunderstand me, please. I appreciate your blogging about
NX and FreeNX. Please help us create quality documentation content 
for the FreeNX website, if you want your contributions to become 
utilized by more people.

Cheers
Kurt Pfeifle
FreeNX Development Team Co-Founder