Started Work On Testing NX 1.5.0
Posted by Stuart Herbert @ 9:28 PM, Sat 18 Feb 06
Filed under: NX / FreeNX
2 Comments
After many months of neglecting them, I’ve started working on updating the ebuilds in Portage for NX Server et al. This bug contains full ebuilds for the free components of NX 1.5.0, thanks to Jon Scruggs. Aron Griffis has already committed his own ebuilds to Portage for everything needed except net-misc/nx-x11 and nxserver-freenx-0.5.0.
The results so far have been mixed.
On the positive side, session suspend and resume really works, and sessions continue to run when disconnected. I can’t stress how useful this is - I can leave my desktop session running at home, and just connect to it from wherever I am during the day. Think “screen”, but for X11. Performance feels as good as ever, which I’m grateful for. (I once used NX via a satellite feed from a ship in the middle of the Carribean to connect to home, and despite the very poor connection, the desktop was very usable).
On the negative side, the Windows client won’t start a second time after disconnecting from a session until the PC has been rebooted; I haven’t spotted why yet. After rebooting and reconnecting to a running session, the keyboard didn’t work at all. I’m hoping to do more tests from other Windows PCs to see if the problem’s just with my laptop or not. The Linux client doesn’t have this problem, fortunately. But … I’ve seen the display corrupt a few times when using Firefox (the app I’ve used most since installing NX 1.5.0 and FreeNX 0.5.0). A quick minimise and restore fixes it, so it’s not a major problem.
My two dev boxes are still packed away from my recent re-cabling of my computer room at home. Once they’re back up and running, I’ll get the ebuilds added to Portage. I’ll also update the ebuilds for the commercial nxserver products, and see if my nxclient problems also happen with them instead of freenx. I also need to add support for modular X11. That’s been held up because I wasn’t able to get modular X11 working in my VMware Workstation environment. Now I have X11 up and running on real hardware, I’m hoping that I won’t have the same trouble second time around.
2 Comments
February 19th, 2006 at 12:34 am
I’ve been playing with the versions from the bugs recently, and I got them to install with Modular X, but I haven’t tested them at all yet.
I had to install the following for nx-x11 to compile. I haven’t rebuilt anything else since installing Modular X, so there may be other build failures.
x11-misc/imake
x11-misc/gccmakedep
I don’t think there was anything else, but that may not be true.
Also, how do you make sessions reconnect from nxclient? I’ve seen sessions suspend (at least the processes are still running, and they show up when I query them via nxserver), but I have no idea how to “re-connect” to a suspended session. Probably it’s something simple that I’m missing.
Thanks for the work on the packages, they’re really cool!
Ira
February 19th, 2006 at 7:15 am
Hi Ira,
In the testing I’ve done, I just connect to the machine as normal, and nxclient automatically reconnects to a suspended session. It gives me no choice in the matter.
Did you build nx-x11 with the ‘resume’ patch from bugzilla? If you’re missing that patch, that might be the difference.
Best regards,
Stu
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