[FreeNX-kNX] Release: FreeNX 0.7.1 "Hip Hop Edition"

[Fabian Franz]

Hi,

as already announced at the last release FreeNX changed to a 3-month
schedule in releases and so far this seems to work great.

There have been lots of bugfixes by several people, so despite the short
time of only 3 months this release really is worth it.

It is called Hip Hop edition, because a formation from my dance school
just reached 2x second place in the IDO World HipHop-Championship 2007.

I needed a name and this event was still on my mind, so I called it like
that ;-).

Highlights of the release are the experimental 3.0.0 support and the
fallback to native rdesktop/vncviewer if nxdesktop/nxviewer are not
available. (Note to packagers: FreeNX still depends on nxpasswd if
vncpasswd is not installed, but you can ship the same as from 2.1.0)

This also finally solves the keyboard issues as it works with native
rdesktop. If you need to use this option with a 2.x backend you can just
rename nxdesktop to for example nxdesktop.old.

Also new is a "kind of" shadowing technology, which uses plain VNC, but
starts x11vnc on the fly. This new technique can be used by starting a new
VNC type session and "resuming" one of the (vnc mirrored) sessions.

Important for users of the file-sharing technology is the ability to use
CIFS as smbmount is no longer shipped with most distributions.

Not so important, but removal of one of the "top" mailing list questions
is the rename of nxclient to nxdialog and you could be interested in the
new "dialog+xterm" interface for systems that have dialog+xterm, but not
xdialog.

And last but not least the ENABLE_CLIPBOARD option is now also available
also in FreeNX.

Here is the full changelog:

14.10.2007 FreeNX 0.7.1 "Hip Hop Edition"
        * Fixed the issue that makes fonts look tiny and unreadable by default
          with freenx and the commercial client. (diamond at google.com)
        * Added invalidating of NSCD cache after group and user add.
          (diamond at google.com)
        * Added better wording with less misunderstanding to dialog of
          nxclient for Suspend/Terminate/Close case. (diamond at google.com)
        * Added 'dialog_interface=dialog' option since many installations may
          not have Xdialog and since xmessage is very limiting. This new option
          will work on any machine that has dialog and xterm.
          (puterguy at bat.berlios.de)
        * Fixed the APPLICATION_LIBRARY_PRELOAD to be just a warning and fixed
          the default path. (fabianx at bat.berlios.de)
        * Added drivers.cache.all that is reloaded just every 60 minutes.
          (puterguy at bat.berlios.de)
        * Fixed missing services stop that lead to redundant mounts and still
          running cupsd processes.
          (puterguy at bat.berlios.de)
        * Added support for mount.cifs additionally to the deprecated
          smbmount. (fabianx at bat.berlios.de, puterguy at bat.berlios.de)
        * Added "host" output to --list to see which user is connected to
          which server in case of loadbalancing.
          (fabianx at bat.berlios.de, Bastian Kames <kames at ibg-monforts.de>)
        * Fixed nxclient -printer to not use commercial client, because its too
          slow in case of huge databases like foomatic. (fabianx at bat.berlios.de)
        * Removed bad -noautokill option from the nxclient dialog spawning.
          (wayneb at bat.berlios.de)
        * Added basic support for mirrored sessions.
          * The functionality can be used by connecting to VNC session
            and choosing to "resume" such a session.
          * New configuration key: ENABLE_MIRROR_VIA_VNC=1
          * New configuration key: ENABLE_DESKTOP_SHARING=1
          (fabianx at bat.berlios.de)
        * Fixed some portability issues.
          * Fixed nxloadconfig in case that COMMAND_X is not only one word,
            like "openssl md5".
          * Added usage of "openssl md5" instead of "md5sum" by default.
          * Changed perl to COMMAND_PERL.
          * Removed rev and replaced the code with efficient awk code.
          * Added an outcommented way to also use "POSIX find" for history
            cleaning.
          (Peter O'Gorman <peter at pogma.com>)
        * Fix ownership of $SSH_AUTHORIZED_KEYS in nxkeygen, just in case
          it is run without nxsetup.
          (fabianx at bat.berlios.de, thx to sambiase on #nx)
        * Fixed diverse occurences of $sess_id in nxnode, when hostname
          contains whitespace.
          (fabianx at bat.berlios.de)
        * Fixed setting up KDE_PRINTRC altogether if ENABLE_KDE_CUPS is not 1,
          and handles errors better when it is but kde-config is not available
          or fails.
          (scop at bat.berlios.de)
        * Changed unix:$display -> :$display to enable FreeNX usage with newer
          xlib in C (used for example by Novell).
          (fabianx at bat.berlios.de)
        * Enabled 3.0.0 backend with same usage pattern as 2.[0|1].0 backend.
          (Shawn Starr <spstarr at kde.org>)
        * Bumped version number to 2.1.0-71 to let things like File-sharing
          port and auxiliary channels work.
          (fabianx at bat.berlios.de)
        * Added parsing of aux parameter. This should remove all keyboard
          related problems with nxdesktop with 2.[01].0 backend.
          (fabianx at bat.berlios.de)
        * Renamed nxclient to nxdialog and setup the necessary environment
          variable for nxagent to find it.
          (fabianx at bat.berlios.de, Thanks to NoMachine for giving this hint)
        * Added experimental support for usage of external rdesktop and
          vncviewer programs.
          This is for example needed for 3.0.0 backend.
          (fabianx at bat.berlios.de)
        * Changed the default load balancing algorithm to "random"
          as the nxcheckload script might not be available.
          (fabianx at bat.berlios.de)
        * Added ENABLE_CLIPBOARD="none|client|server|both" option
          to node.conf to disable, restrict or enable the clipboard
          synchronization.
          (fabianx at bat.berlios.de)

Enjoy and download from:

http://prdownload.berlios.de/freenx/freenx-0.7.1.tar.gz

cu

Fabian

PS: About the redesign: We are working on it and its ready when its ready :-)