[CentOS] Setting up a GUI remote access

[Les Mikesell]

On 4/29/2011 9:10 AM, Richard Mollel wrote:
>
> I just tried FreeNX on server (centos), and NX Client from Nomachine. Setup was not bad, though too many sources of info. Settled on centos wiki doc to get me going.

You shouldn't have to do anything but:
yum install freenx
and then get the contents of /etc/nxserver/client.id_dsa.key into the 
client config.  (You can xfer the file and import it, but I usually just 
ssh in, cat the file to the screen and copy/paste the text between windows).

> However, once I got logged in (using gnome), there are some very normal applications that I am unable to launch, and they work flawlessly with Xming (or the commercial Xwin32). For example, I am unable to launch a gui for our backup program, netvault, gui is "nvgui". It simply flashes, and dies out. That was on day one.

That has to do with font handling, but I've forgotten the details. 
There are old/new ways of doing X fonts and NX only does it the new way 
by default.  You can fix it by using a font server or installing all the 
old style fonts, or something like that.  I didn't need to run any old 
programs badly enough to deal with it.

> I suspended the session, and tried to re-attach this morning. It worked, great. However, it seems to have a big issue with backing store. I have killed all sessions, reconnected, same issue. If I "shake" a window, it leaves its traces all over, and there is nothing I can do about it but kill the session again and retry. Any ideas?

That must have something to do with your client platform video drivers. 
  I think it is mostly cygwin X code or equivalent under the covers 
handling the display.  I see it sometimes on a dual-headed windows 
client but only  if I open the window on one monitor, then drag it to 
the other. Other than that, the LAN performance I see is pretty much a 
match for the local console for everything short of live video and still 
pretty good after the initial redraw when I pick up the session 
remotely.  Can you try it from some other computer?  You might also play 
with the client config option related to caching (that slider from Modem 
to LAN speed and the cache sizes in the advanced tab).  If you client 
doesn't have much ram or has a slow disk it might help to tune those down.

By the way, if you run the client from a Mac or Linux, you get the 
option to resize the window after it opens.  The windows client will 
snap to the available size (or what you specify in the client) as it 
opens, which doesn't have to match the previous session size, but won't 
change on the fly.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com