NoMachine NX server free edition

Besides all the professional NX servers for enteprises, NoMachine also offers a free (as in beer) server, which offers most of the features available in the other servers (with a maximum of 2 simultaneous connections). If you’d like to discover how NoMachine’s servers work or are configured, give it a try! You may find the fonts to have a slightly different look compared to freenx.

Now that their latest maintenance release fixed a QA problem in the tarballs, ebuilds for this server will get into portage soon (net-misc/nxnode and net-misc/nxserver-freeedition, already available in the NX overlay). They will be available for x86 and multilib-amd64

Note for people who already have it installed: if you encounter license problems, the quickiest way is to remove your /usr/NX folder, and reinstall it entirely. Despite being free, this server still needs a license file, which may get clobbered by previous installs

Updated NX ebuilds now in portage

As promised, with your next “emerge –sync”, you’ll get:

  • latest nxclient 2.1 release (with desktop entries and pixmaps)
  • bumped NX 2.1 components (remote desktop looks even nicer/faster with tem)
  • freenx 0.6 release (NX 2.1 compatibility, closes some bugs)
  • last but not least: amd64 support (for multilib profiles) for all of these ebuilds!

These allowed me to clean up the open NX bugs list in bugzilla 🙂

Also, if you are still using split NX components (ie net-misc/nxcomp, net-misc/nxssh, …), these will be removed soon (and are not used by NX server ebuilds anymore): the “new” package to use is net-misc/nx, which regroups all NX components (and prevents some bugs too!)

For people waiting for NoMachine’s free edition server ebuilds, they stay in the NX overlay for now (QA issue, NoMachine is working on it).

New Gentoo developer

Hi all!

Thanks to my mentor genstef, I am now a Gentoo developer. For now, I will be working on the NX-related packages in Gentoo.

If you never used it, NX technology allows you to enjoy a full remote desktop (KDE/Gnome/…) even over high latency, low bandwidth links. There is a good techical presentation here by NoMachine (the company that developed the NX protocol).

If you use it, well there already are some updated ebuilds in the NX overlay, whil will progressively get into Portage. What’s on the agenda?

  • Close bugs, clean up old versions, …
  • Bump NX libraries to 2.1 (current version is 1.5 only)
  • Add FreeNX (the GPL server) 0.6 release
  • Add ~amd64 support (thanks mulitlib)

That’s for the near future, other features are still under development (nomachine’s free edition server, native amd64 nx server, 2X server/client, …)