[CentOS] FreeNX authenticates but no desktop on centos 5 ??

Hi all,

I am new to CentOS and freeNX -- both look really awesome, a huge thanks to
all the people making them happen.

I am having a problem with freenx that appears to be specific to centos 5.
my client authenticates but then no desktop comes up. however, when I
connect to a similar machine running centos 4.4, I authenticate and the
gnome desktop just pops up sweet as can be. I also have a vnc connection to
my centos 5 workstation working, and can get a gnome desktop through vnc,
and direct X11 connections are fine.

the two nxserver machines have stable IP addresses, I have root access. the
nxclient machine is a mac G4 PPC (which presumably makes no difference at
all), with very recent download of the mac OS X client from nomachine.

I followed the instructions for setting up freenx on centos 4.4 found here:
http://linuxgazette.net/135/knaggs.html
and it worked perfectly the first time I tried. the key steps were

wget
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/extras/i386/RPMS/nx-1.5.0-1.centos4.i386.rpm
wget
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/extras/i386/RPMS/freenx-0.5.0-10.c4.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh nx-1.5.0-1.centos4.i386.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh freenx-0.5.0-10.c4.noarch.rpm

plus a quick copy-paste of the client dsa key, and nxserver --adduser <me>

For CentOS 5, I tried the yum-based instructions found at
http://wiki.centos.org/FreeNX (which says that freenx only works with centos
4, and the bottom of page says "FreeNX (last edited 2007-02-08 23:38:36 by
JohnnyHughes )" -- hopefully its just the wiki is out of date)

I also tried adapting the above steps to use the centos 5 packages from
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/extras/i386/RPMS/
freenx-0.5.0-13.el5.centos.i386.rpm              08-Apr-2007 11:00   66K
nx-2.1.0-6.el5.centos.i386.rpm                   08-Apr-2007 11:00  2.9M

either way, I get authenticated but no desktop comes up in the X11 window on
the client machine. (just to be explicit:
using exactly the same client I do get a desktop on the centos
4.4 machine).

While trying to connect, During this time, on the remote (CentOS) machine,
its clear that something is happening,
because "ps -ef | grep nx" on the server machine gives me

root      5627  3378  0 10:38 ?        00:00:00 sshd: nx [priv]
nx        5629  5627  0 10:38 ?        00:00:00 sshd: nx at notty
nx        5630  5629  0 10:38 ?        00:00:00 /bin/bash /usr/bin/nxserver
-c /usr/bin/nxserver
nx        5771  5630  0 10:38 ?        00:00:00 sleep 60
jg     5800  5393  0 10:38 pts/1    00:00:00 grep nx

I checked out a couple other things on the web on how to set it up and these
did not help (they were very helpful, just not with my problem about the
desktop not coming up). E.g.,
http://fedoranews.org/contributors/rick_stout/freenx/

I also noted other posts about freenx on this list, but they did not seem to
be relevant

However, I note that at http://wiki.centos.org/FreeNX is says that freenx
only works with centos 4, which I am hoping is simply out of date, as freenx
is shipped as part of centos 5. I saw a post today saying that freenx is
supposed to work exactly the same on CentOS 5 as per instructions for 4.
hmmm. I've tried uninstalling freenx on the centOS 5 machine and
reinstalling.

any suggestions appreciated! many thanks,

--Jeremy
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