[Leaplist] NoMachine NX and remote bliss

[Jason Boxman]

It seems I've been living under a rock for a few years.  I know about 
NoMachine's NX, but I hadn't go through and set it up.  Rather, the 
reimplementation of the NX server, freenx, looked like too much of a hassle 
to build, so I never bothered.

[1] http://www.nomachine.com/

NoMachine happens to have a free beer NX server which is fine for a single 
user.  I installed it on my server and the NX client on my laptop.  After 
manually removing my /home/.nx user from several years ago, which was 
breaking the install process, it installed without incident.

[2] http://www.nomachine.com/download.php

In fact, I didn't have to do anything at all for a basic install.  After I 
installed the client, I simply pointed it at my server -- or rather a 
localhost tunnel to the server's ssh port -- and after a moment my KDE 
session appeared, nearly as fast as a local session.  I'd heard it was that 
smooth, but you'd have to see it to believe it.  It was near-local over a 
256Kbps ADSL link.

It's effortless to use out-of-the-box these days.  I think I had to configure 
an SSH server it shipped with when I last tried it or something far less 
intuitive.

Supposedly it'll tunnel print jobs using CUPS, audio, and something with 
Samba.  I haven't tried any of those, though.

Actually, the only annoying thing is, when you run the client the first time, 
it saved all my files in ~/.nx with root as the owner.  
Running /usr/NX/bin/nxclient also brings up the wizard.  You have to run

/usr/NX/bin/nxclient --session "/home/jasonb//config/test.nxs"

to actually get back at a session.  It won't list the available sessions for 
you, so you'd have to run `ls` on your config directory yourself I guess.

Hrm.  Didn't save my first session, either.

Relatively minor stuff -- no server configuration was required at all for 
basic functionality.

`/usr/NX/bin/nxclient --config .nx/config/nxclient.cfg`

The above seems necessary to actually be able to select a session and then 
change its configuration options.  Using --session just lets you use the 
session, not change any options prior to connecting...

So the client side stuff is kind of weak.