[FreeNX-kNX] FreeNX and Debian Etch - A Horror Tale

[Peter Daum]

Hi,

according to some postings here it seems to be at least not completely
hopeless to run nx on Debian Etch.I checked out anything that I could
find, but to no avail. Here my experiences:

The packages provided by nomachine have obvious unresolved library
dependencies (at least libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3, I didn't go any deeper
because the free version is too restricted for my purposes anyway).

I tried "http://kern.nl/freenx/" which was mentioned here. The session
always timed out. With the highest loglevel the only hint from the log
was that nxagent failed. Eventually I found that there is an uresolved
library dependency on libXcompext.so.2 (while the deb package claims to
depend on libxcompext1). The only "libXcompext.so.2" I could find was
somewhere in an rpm package for redhat fc6. With this library, nxagent
crashes with a floating point exception.

Then I tried "http://packages.debianbase.de/etch/i386/nx" (also mentioned
here). Again there first was an unmet library dependency, this time "nxagent"
was linked against "libXcomp.so.1", while the package claims to depend on
libxcomp1 (which only contains a libXcomp.so.2). I eventually found a
suitable library in an old nomachine nx client. Next, nxagent would not start
because it could not find the font "fixed" (which it was looking for at
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/ while it actually is at /usr/share/fonts/X11) which I
fixed with a symlink.

Now I can at least start nxagent by hand, but the nxserver is still
not working - now the log contains the message
 "1004 Error: nxagent failed to start with: Unrecognized option: 1"
and at least at first sight, I can't figure out what is going wrong
thist time...

All this was taking place on a freshly installed Debian Etch system
(Actually, I was planning to swich to debian in the future).

Has anybody meanwhile discovered NX packages for Debian Etch that really
work (and maybe are even sort of maintained?). Even if I find a workaround
for that last syntax error, I'd be scared that the next minor upgrade might
break things again ...

Regards,
                Peter Daum