Mohamed Ibrahim’s Blog

I’ve read a lot in the internet, and many posts claim that freenx installs seamlessly and works without any hiccups even the ubuntu community docs, which might in fact have been true at one point of time. The one that really worked well with no problems is nxserver from nomachine, however, the free version of nxserver is limited to two users and two sessions. This makes it impractical if a machine is being accessed by more than two.

Freenx comes in as the solution however, every time I try to install freenx I spend at least an hour trying to guess what’s going on and then I leave off to something more useful. This time I decided to take it all the way to the end. I debugged every call from the nxserver file, till I located the problem and finally got it to work.

I will describe what I did and how I got it to work, although the solution might not work for every one and on every setup, yet it is better than nothing.

STEP 1
Add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list [exactly like the community docs say]
deb http://free.linux.hp.com/~brett/seveas/freenx feisty-seveas freenx
deb-src http://free.linux.hp.com/~brett/seveas/freenx feisty-seveas freenx

STEP 2
apt-get install freenx

STEP 3
vi /usr/lib/nx/nxnode

Goto line 482 (press 482gg)

Edit the line (press i), change it to:
PATH=”$PATH_BIN:$PATH”

Add another line after:
$PATH_BIN/nxagent :$display 2>&3 &

Go out of editing mode - press ESC

Save the file type :wq and press enter

STEP 4
vi /etc/nxserver/node.conf

go to line 70 (70gg)
uncomment ENABLE_SSH_AUTHENTICATION=”1″

STEP 5
Download the nxclient for windows from the nomachine’s website. Make sure the SSL is not checked (i.e. SSL encryption is on). Connect with your client to your server and enjoy.

What was the problem with freenx then ?
The nxagent does not run as expected, and goes out with exit code 1 because it can’t find an option file somewhere inside the .nx directory. Earlier in the process, that option file should have been generated but it looks like it does not. After the nxagent terminates, your client does not find any one to communicate with on the other side and finally gives up and generates an error. If you remove the options parameter from nxagent line, sometimes nxagent goes out with an error because it can’t find a font ! so I ended up removing all parameters except the display. Well, it worked ok for me & I hope it does for the rest of you.

Technorati Tags: freenx, nxserver, ubuntu, feisty, bug, nomachine

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Google / Internet / Programming, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.