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

Thu Apr 26 21:16:59 UTC 2007

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeremy Gray [mailto:jrgray at gmail.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 12:21 PM
> To: centos at centos.org
> Subject: [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.

Not that I am an expert, but I use it often on 4.4. I just setup nx and 
freenx on CentOS 5 last night so I could get into Xen to adjust a 
Windows server.  

> 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.

What is the version number of nxclient that the mac G4 have installed?

> I followed the instructions for setting up freenx on centos 
> 4.4 found here: 
http://linuxgazette.net/135/knaggs.htmlfreenx-0.5.0-13.el5.centos
> 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 
> <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 hopefully its just the wiki is out of date) 

Wrong and out of date.  

I simply did a 'yum install nx freenx'.  Once it finished I coppied the 
/etc/nxserver/client.id_dsa.key (from the server) to my (client) system, 
and renamed it to the hostname.id_dsa.key for tracking.  Obviously 
imported it into the nxclient as the key to use with ssl encryption 
enabled. Then connected.  Took me about 2 minutes to finish short of 
downloading the latest linux client for my workstation.  The install is 
intelligent and restarts ssh for you, and works out of the box.  I also 
installed this server with ONLY the Server X Windows option, disabling 
the Gnome and any other desktop (not sure if server just enabled gnome 
after the fact), but when I setup nxclient, I told it to open Gnome, and 
I still got a desktop.

Of course I was logging in as root at the time, so I skipped the adding 
the user step, but I often do for testing initially to ensure its 
working.  But obviously your user steps should apply for accounts other 
then root.

> 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. 
> 

Deffinately out of date, first hand experience tells me it does work, at 
least for me.  Have you tried logging into root or other users?  If you 
havent taken the exact steps I did, remove the other components, just 
yum install like I did, and recopy the client.id_dsa.key.  If the system 
isnt in production and you can restart it then do after you uninstall.  
Hate to suggest a windowism, but just to make sure the X server on the 
local box is restarted if its running, and ssh is flushed before it 
reloads the NX configuration again and restarts (which you should see 
during the yum installations).

> any suggestions appreciated! many thanks,
> 
> --Jeremy 
> 
> 