NX Client 3.0 for Windows Works with FreeNX

Jun
25
2007

I've been a fan of using FreeNX to remotely connect to my Linux desktops (both real and virtual). It works much more like you're "natively" using the machine than VNC, making it much more like Windows Remote Desktop, but without the hassle of manual X Forwarding. Plus, it lets you better handle varying desktop sizes without having to change the native resolution of the remote desktop.

Unfortunately, the recommendation from the FreeNX project is to use the free client from NoMachine (the commercial NX terminal server equivalent of FreeNX) as the Windows client. That's unfortunate because of a disconnect in something that means that the 2.0 version of the Windows client doesn't work with the packages of FreeNX for Ubuntu/Debian Linux.

That meant that I've been either having to install the commercial NX server (which has connection limits I'm not thrilled about) or dig around for an older version of the Windows client (which wasn't as easy as I had thought) in order to use this setup. It's definitely worth it over using VNC, but still irritating.

Then, today I was setting up a new virtual machine and, after installing FreeNX on the server, went to install an NX client on a Windows machine, but didn't have my archived copy of the older 1.5 version handy, so I went back to the NoMachine site to see if I could find it again.

That's when I noticed that there was a 3.0 version available, so I gave that a shot. Glory be, it works with FreeNX with no problems.

I don't know exactly what changed in either piece to make it work and this time I don't really care. All I know is that I can now run the newest client and the free server and all is right with the world.

Posted in Linux, Software, Technology |

 

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J

5 Responses to “NX Client 3.0 for Windows Works with FreeNX”

  1. Sam Says:
    June 29th, 2007 at 2:53 pm

    Oddly the version 3.0 version didn't work for me at first. So I uninstalled it at found a 2.1 version of the client on the net. Tried that and it worked. So I re-installed the 3.0 on top of the 2.1 version and that works now.

  2. J Wynia Says:
    June 29th, 2007 at 2:59 pm

    That does seem odd, especially since I couldn't get any of the 2.x versions to work with any of my FreeNX installations. Hmm.

  3. Shawn Says:
    October 3rd, 2007 at 4:10 pm

    I'm curious to know what version of FreeNX you using? I am using 0.4.4 on FreeBSD and I could not get NX client 3.x to work. I had to resort to using 1.5. I would love to have 3.x working…

  4. J Wynia Says:
    October 3rd, 2007 at 8:53 pm

    I don't have access at the moment to check exactly what version, but it's whatever is in the aptitude repositories for Ubuntu.

    Given that 0.7.0 was released in July, it sounds like the version in the FreeBSD ports system is a bit behind compared to the latest.

  5. J Wynia Says:
    October 4th, 2007 at 7:55 am

    I just checked one of the boxes in question and it's running 0.6.0.

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