NX is a pain to set up. Maybe it’s just my bad luck that something goes wrong every time I try to set it up, or perhaps I’m just plain stupid but I find it a pain and it normally makes me feel like chewing my ethernet cable after a while. A long while back I managed to get nxserver-freeedition working fine, but recently it stopped and in the process I decided to switch over to using FreeNX – an open-source implementation of NX. Here is how I got it up finally, mainly for archival purposes.

Before starting, you may want to clean your system. unmerge nxclient nxnode nxserver-freeedition nxserver-freenx, etc, rm -r /usr/NX (if freeedition), rm -r /etc/nxserver (if FreeNX), remove the nx user and the nx group, rm -r ~/.nx/ for all users.

1. emerge nxclient
2. emerge nxserver-freenx
3. nxsetup --install --setup-nomachine-key --clean --purge (the –setup-no-machine key option means that you just need to use the default key that the nxclient comes with)
4. Try to connect via nxclient, tail -f /var/log/messages, if it complains about the user being locked, do usermod -p foo nx, where foo is a password you’ll use.
5. Start debugging why it doesn’t work.

When debugging I normally:

• Make sure SSH works first. Refer to my sshd_config (obviously this is specific to my setup, but notice that PasswordAuthentication is set to yes, as that’s how you’ll authenticate with NX with nxclient)
• Make sure you own your own authorized_keys(2) file, after a while of mucking about you might’ve screwed the permissions (600).
• Check that you’re pointing at the right authorized_keys(2) file, though I didn’t need to bother about this with FreeNX, I know that this is a common mistake with nxserver-freeedition
• I like to run SSH on port 443, so change to port 443 in /etc/nxserver/node.conf for FreeNX, and if using freeedition in /usr/NX/etc/server.cfg, node.cfg, whatever is specific to your setup.

As for my experience switching over to FreeNX from freeedition, honestly in terms of usability it’s no different at all, but personally in terms of installation procedure FreeNX wins by a mile. But for the moment I’m just happy I won’t be restricted by my school’s web filtering system and glitchy, laggy, virus-filled OS. Perhaps when NeatX stabilises a little I might check it out.

No related posts.