Remote desktop with nx

Recently I access all my linux machines using ssh from cygwin on the Windows XP desktop. This is inconvenience as I will need to open 5-6 terminal/bash windows for my development work on these machines. I have been investigating the VNC solution that is available for both Windows and Linux.

Using VNC, I run vncserver on my Linux server, and run VNC client on Windows. That sound logical to solve my problem... but not really. I will need to login to Gnome desktop or to enable automatic login in Gnome before I can get the VNC client on Windows able to connect to it. Later on, I found a new solution : NX

From all the information I get in one day, NX is backed by a commercial company NoMachine even though I can find a free implementation of NX: freenx

In my new barebone Linux server, I first installed the freenx as instructed from this link.

edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following line:

deb http://sidux.com/debian/ unstable nx

apt-get update; apt-get install freenx

select NoMachine key in debconf.

After all, download and install the NX windows client. Unfortunately, when supplying the username and password, ssh connection is established but the NX connection times out. This was very strange. After tracing the problem I found that the NX server version installed is 1.5.0 while the client version from NoMachine is 2.1.0. I suspected the version mismatch may cause incompatible between client and server. So, I went to NoMachine website and downloaded the "freeware" version of NX.

I downloaded nxserver, nxclient and nxnode software from NoMachine:

• nxserver_2.1.0-22_i386.deb
• nxclient_2.1.0-17_i386.deb
• nxnode_2.1.0-22_i386.deb

and then run dpkg to install it:

dpkg -i nxserver_2.1.0-22_i386.deb nxclient_2.1.0-17_i386.deb nxnode_2.1.0-22_i386.deb

You may encounter dependency problem for libstdc++-glibc. If so, run the following to install it explicitly before running "dpkg -i"

apt-get install libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2

Normally nothing you will need to configure. So I start NX Client on Windows right away... and it works! Now I have a remote desktop environment to access my new barebone server.