Comments on: FreeNX on Ubuntu Feisty

By: Matthew Richardson

Matthew Richardson — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 12:45:00 +0000

A different option, which worked for me on Feisty, is to set in /etc/nxserver/node.conf:

AGENT_EXTRA_OPTIONS_X=”-fp unix/:7100″

By: Mohamed Ibrahim

Mohamed Ibrahim — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 14:29:25 +0000

Zaf, thanks for this. I will try it, and hopefully it works. I also did some playing yesterday, and managed to get it to work but it looks like that I removed some parameters that were used to pass to the agent. Those include the amount of compression – so I’m always now running on LAN.

There two reasons that it is not working. The nxagent does not find the options file, and there is a font problem. I will try your fixes and see if it is still not finding the options file in the .nx dir.

Thanks for reponse.

By: zaf

zaf — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 02:18:33 +0000

Just an addendum to that previous comment, the AGENT_EXTRA_OPTIONS_X field should all be on one line, and surrounding with double quote ” marks.

By: zaf

zaf — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 02:17:42 +0000

Mohamed, Oooh, now thats a tricky one. I had that happen to me when I was fiddling with some things. It’s been a while since I’ve played with FreeNX, as in the end I decided it wasn’t what I was looking for.

If I recall correctly (and I’m not sure that I do), the black screen issue often comes about because it can’t start whatever process is required. I found this issue was because of fonts for the X server.

There are a number of debugging options that you can set:
In /etc/nxserver/node.conf
NX_LOG_LEVEL=7
NX_LOGFILE=/tmp/nxserver.log
will log pretty much everything to the above log file
Also set
SESSION_LOG_CLEAN=0
To ensure that it doesn’t remove the session directories after disconnection.

When you next try to connect, look at /tmp/nxserver.log for any errors, and also check your ~/.nx/ directory. There should be at least one directory in there that refers to your last session. Inside that directory is a lot of information on that session. Look through each file looking for errors.

If I’m right, and its a font issue, the fix that I used was set the following option in node.conf
AGENT_EXTRA_OPTIONS_X=”-fp /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc,/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1,/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi,/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi”

I would suggest using the Windows client tool to change to a “Custom” connection (rather than KDE/Gnome) and configure it to run xeyes (eg: /usr/bin/xeyes). If that works, then it gives you something to go from.

By: Installing freenx on ubuntu feisty - step by step till you see the GUI » Mohamed Ibrahim

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 01:46:20 +0000

[...] read a lot in the internet, and many posts claim that freenx installs seamlessly and works without any hiccups even the ubuntu community docs, [...]

By: Mohamed Ibrahim

Mohamed Ibrahim — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 19:24:46 +0000

I’ve followed your steps. I installed freenx, did the setup, downloaded the nxclient for windows from the nomachine website. When I run the client the black window pops up that has the !m logo, then it disappears with a message that the connection was terminated.

That doesn’t happen with the nomachine nxserver. I installed the nomachine nxserver before and it ran seamlessly. My problem with it is the limit of 2 users only, and I’ve tried installing the freenx server numerous times, and even when enabling the log the messages I get in /var/log/nxserver.log is really helpless !

I would appreciate if you can post more details. I’m using feisty dist-upgraded to latest.