FreeNX on Debian and Redhat

Given that the VTK installation is -uhm- challenging and not everybody has a huge computer we decided to experiment with some remote desktop applications. After a short evaluation (and believe me there isn't that much -- X, VNC, NX, and something backed by SUN) we decided to go with NX.

Early versions of FreeNX lack the GLX support which is critical for a 3D application like VTK so make sure to get a recent copy (>=1.5). Unfortunately there is no compression for GLX so make sure to reduce the triangles to make the application fast over the net...

In the Debian case you just add deb http://www.linux.lk/~anuradha/nx/ ./ to your apt-sources and then install them as usual. Run nxsetup, add a user with nxserver, and you are ready to go with one of the many clients offered at NoMachine's site. Beware: For some reasons the OS X client doesn't work with FreeNX.

The Redhat/Fedora people didn't do such a good job: I installed freenx-0.4.4-1.rh.0.noarch.rpm and nx-1.5.0-0.FC1?.1.i386.rpm from the FreeNX Fedora Howto and followed the instructions. I also carried out the following commands: nxsetup --clean --install --setup-nomachine-key Which created the nx user and his group. Unfortunately the rights for the keys sshd uses seem to be wrong in /var/lib/nxserver/home/.ssh -- I followed this guide to fix it. Lastly the public keys used by this installation are different from the ones used in the NoMachine-Clients. So you either copy the keys from somewhere on to your machine, generate the right keys, or copy the keys from your machine to the clients. I decided to go the later route and this worked fine for me.

Next week I will explain how to set-up moznx beacuse ultimately we want people just to click a link to use the VTK application and not worry about keys...