[FreeNX-kNX] Basic usage question - remote access from a laptop?

[Nick Hall]

Hello,

I recently read about NX and was excited to try it out as it seems more
advanced than VNC in a lot of ways, but I've been struggling to get it to
work the way I want it to. My main computer has a 1920x1080 monitor, and I
do most of my work on there, but sometimes I connect to that computer from
my laptop over Wifi and do some work remotely. The laptop screen is much
lower resolution than my main monitor. Previously I've been connecting with
VNC and using screen scaling in order to access the computer. That works OK,
its just that VNC isn't as responsive as would be ideal, even over Wifi. I
read that NX is much more responsive so I was eager to try it.

At first I tried connecting in a similar way as with VNC, where I opened a
shadow session and connected it to my main session. I was able to get on OK,
but whatever screen scaling the NX client does is horrible and the display
is unreadable.

Opening a new Unix-Gnome session from my laptop isn't an option, as I would
have to close down all my applications on my main computer and then reopen
them in this new desktop.

Then I read this page:
http://openfacts2.berlios.de/wikien/index.php/BerliosProject:FreeNX_-_FAQ/Usage_Scenarios
which
describes a similar usage situation to what I'm trying to accomplish. As I
read that, the only way I can figure out how to do it is that instead of
launching applications directly on my main computer, I would have to open an
NX Unix-Gnome session to localhost, then run apps that way. Then from my
laptop I could connect to the same session, and it would rearrange the
desktop to handle the different resolution and it would be easier to work
because nothing is scaled. The problem with this, though, is that I'm not
going to do 8 hours of work every day under the NX session connected to
localhost, as its still too slow. Dragging a window around
is noticeably slower than with the live system, which seems obvious as there
is an additional layer in between.

What I really need is the ability to properly connect from my laptop to my
main computer's native Gnome session. Am I doing something wrong, or is this
impossible? If the scaling worked, I could still get by with a shadow
session, as it would presumably be more responsive than VNC, but my monitors
aren't the same resolution. Is there a way to get the scaling to work? It
seems like one very common application would be to connect from a laptop to
a desktop, and it is very common that laptop screens are lower resolution.
Thanks for any advice,

Nick
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