Still Working On Sorting Out FreeNX On Gentoo
Posted by Stuart Herbert @ 8:58 AM, Wed 15 Nov 06
Filed under: NX / FreeNX
4 Comments
The amd64 desktop is finally built (although I don’t know how long it’ll continue to work before the hard drive dies), and I’m making steady progress on getting the NX packages working on amd64.
The only real showstopper at the moment with FreeNX is that desktop-related processes get left hanging around when you log out of an NX session. Apart from eating up unnecessary RAM, these processes stop you from logging back in via FreeNX later on. I’m seeing the behaviour w/ Gnome-2.14, and it’s also been reported to happen w/ KDE-3.5.
I’ve had no luck tracking down any fixes for this via Google (and it doesn’t help that Fabien seems to have disappeared once more … no upstream commits for 4 months now). It’s been reported that this only happens w/ nxclient-2.1, but I get the problem with the older nxclient-1.5 too. I suppose it could be a problem w/ the NX-1.5 components (I notice that Fedora are using the >=NX-2.0 for their RPMs); that’s something else to explore.
It doesn’t really help that I’d much rather be working on the LAMP Server seed than trying to get FreeNX working 
4 Comments
November 15th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
Hello Stuart,
are you planning to support the NoMachines NX Free Edition for Linux in portage, too?
NoMachines NX client,node and free edition server work very well here on amd64.
Installing them like suggested in the forums works great:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3576928.html#3576928
but having them installed and updated through portage would of course be awesome.
Regards,
Timo Gurr
November 15th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Hi Timo,
Yes, I’m planning on supporting the NX Free Edition too. There are ebuilds for it in the NX overlay.
Best regards,
Stu
November 15th, 2006 at 6:29 pm
I had a similar problem with the processes being left open with the old freenx 1.4 on 32 bit. I described the problem here, but most folks seemed puzzled: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-381011-highlight-freenx+ram.html
I kind of got around the problem by writing a very simple script that just ran:
nxserver –cleanup, and did a pkill -9 on every single user I had. I then removed some temporary files in /tmp also every night.
I felt bad about doing this, but I didn’t know how else to alleviate the problem. Even after doing that though, I felt that there were a lot of processes open for each user…
Someone mentioned the 2X terminal server, maybe if freenx isn’t being maintained, its time for a switch?
November 15th, 2006 at 8:34 pm
Hi John,
I’m planning on adding the 2X server too. They have the full source code for the server and client, which means that we can eventually port the lot to other architectures.
At the moment, I’m waiting for them to make some changes to their build script. Last time I looked at it, their build script relied on a full checkout of their Subversion repository, which isn’t what we want to deal with for Gentoo. But my contact there has been very helpful, and I’m hoping they’ll accomodate our needs (they might have made the changes already).
I wish I had the time; I’m sorely tempted to port FreeNX from bash to Ruby, which would make it a lot easier to maintain in the long run. But FreeNX is just a necessary distraction for me; the Gentoo LAMP Server is really more my thing.
It’ll take me a few days, but I should be able to take FreeNX apart and figure out whether or not it’s to blame for the processes being left behind. Chances are I’ve made a mistake somewhere, and it’s that which is really the problem.
Best regards,
Stu
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