[SOLVED] FreeNX

[billr]

In a topic on tigervnc (viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2266), it was suggested to look at FreeNX as an alternative. I have FreeNX working on Mageia 2 Beta and thought I would post how in a different topic to make it easy to find.

As mentioned in that other post, nxagent and nxproxy are included in Mageia 2, but the FreeNX package is not.
(There is a bug open on it https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2819 .) I grabbed the freenx-0.7.3 package from the Mandriva 2011 contrib repository and installed it (after installing required dependencies, such as expect, netcat, Xdialog). Next, I followed the Mandiva wiki entry for FreeNX configuration here: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Freenx .

Two additional changes were required:
1. in /etc/ssh/sshd_config comment out the line "AuthorizedKeyFiles .ssh/authorized_keys" as FreeNX uses "authorized_keys2" and we want to allow that, as well as "authorized_keys".

2. add the following lines to the /usr/bin/nxnode file, just after the PATH is set in line 21:

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export AGENT_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/lib/nx"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$AGENT_LIBRARY_PATH:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

This is required to force nx to use the proper libraries. If you don't do this, you'll see a session error about xrdb failing to run.

[obgr_seneca]

Well grabbing a package from another distro might not work in the long run, especially when said distro is using rpm5 instead of the official rpm.
It would certainly be better, if it would be available in the Mageia repos, but it needs a packager interested in it.
I have build the nx lib packages but I never used freenx and maintaining a package you don't use is not that good an idea.

Another idea, which I would also prefer to using a package of another distro would be, grabbing the src.rpm and rebuilding it

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# you need to have rpm-build package installed for this
# and of course you have to replace foo.src.rpm by the actual name of the src.rpm
urpmi --buildrequires foo.src.rpm
rpmbuild --rebuild foo.src.rpm

Oliver

[billr]

You are correct, that is the proper way to do it. In using the package from Mandriva I wanted to at least see if I could get it working. It does turn out there are not many build dependencies for FreeNX so it is easy to rebuild from the SRPM (in fact, I just did it).

[billr]

Just a final followup to this thread. After upgrading to Mageia 2 final and having problems with FreeNX again, I installed X2Go and I must say I was pleasantly surprised. I was initially put off by the x2go website and the many "coming soon" documentation pages, but I went for it anyway and have been very pleased. I just plain worked and has continued to work.

[doktor5000]

So care to mark the thread as [SOLVED] ?

[rhoward]

I do not understand why this was marked as solved when the underlying problem is that freenx is not included as a package.

I have downloaded the freenx source from the mageia repositories and have built the rpm locally and installed it.
I found a problem with it being started too soon by systemd and causing some other items to fail.
I have looked at the code that fedora is using http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/free ... .git/tree/ for there RPM. It looks like the .service file may be useful to get the freenx server started correctly with systemd and mageia

[billr]

rhoward, you are correct in the sense that there are still problems with FreeNX and no package is included. On the other hand, the topic of this thread (how to get it running in the absence of an official package) was solved. It looks like you may have found some additional issues. As I mentioned above, I have abandoned FreeNX in favor of x2go, which seems to be much more robust and always starts again after one end or the other of the connection goes away.

[rhoward]

billr I have been using freenx 24 hours a day for many years and found it extremely stable. The lack of working freenx server has kept me migrating to mageia. As I said I will try and see what I can do with .service file and maybe rebase on the fedora code line if I have time.
I have looked at x2go. It is supported on a limited number of distributions. The client is available for even fewer distributions which makes it impossible for my end users to use.