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.r... wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/extras/i386/RPMS/freenx-0.5.0-10.c4.noarch... 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the bottom of page says "FreeNX (last edited 2007-02-08 23:38:36 by JohnnyHughes )" -- hopefully its just the wiki is out of date)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@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