thanks for the continuing ideas! but alas, still no desktop. details below. thanks for your patience with the long thread and my little mystery.... > > Then, here's another silly question. When you copied the key, did you > > copy the whole thing including the === BEGIN === and === END=== lines? > > > > I think an error in the key would cause an authentication error instead > of what he is seeing (but you might break it deliberately to be sure). I had not copied the ===BEGIN=== and end lines, but I had also not copied them from the client key on the CentOS 4.4 box (which worked anyway), and authentication worked on centos 5 but nonetheless I just tried copy-pasting those lines too (== the whole file contents) from CentOS 5 into the mac client, and get the exact same (lack of) behavior. and just for completeness, I copied the client dsa key file from the server (using sftp rather than copy paste from a terminal window into the nxclient key window) and then used the import button in the nxclient key window. same thing, authenticates but no hint of a desktop there is a well known (and mildly annoying) end-of-line character difference between mac and unix, which could potentially come into play. but its a trivial conversion (s /\r/\n/g), and the awesome folks at nomachine have got to know all about it when building an nxclient for mac. and if there was something amiss here, the same copy-paste from CentOS 4.4 would give me the same issue and yes, deliberately breaking it works just fine :-) , meaning no authentication. I deleted the final '=' from the DSA key (from the key part, not the ===END===, which for me is more like -----END-----) and tried connecting, and it would not authenticate, saying the DSA key was corrupt or had had a passphrase attached to it. when I paste that back in, I get authenticated but no desktop. I also tried deleting a '-' from the ----END---- line, and it fails to authenticate Is gnome starting normally at the console or could there be some problem > at that level? yes, at the console its doing lots of lovely gnome-like things, and fires up over vnc I've forgotten if you need to be in runlevel 5 for > freenx like you do for remote xdm logins, but that's another possibility. nice idea, but I've been at run level 5 all along. and just verified this with "who -r" (I don't know enough to mess with other run levels). and Akemi says run level 3 is fine -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20070427/2eb12748/attachment-0004.html>