Yet another open-source NX server!

In my last post about FreeNX future, I had mentioned the efforts on a freenx-redesign branch, which seemed to have stalled.

Well, trust the guys at Google that worked on this redesign, they did not give up, and in fact publicly announced the first public release of neatx, the result of the redesign work. While still missing some of the features available in FreeNX, it does already have some original ones, like the drop-down menu for session control in rootless sessions (which is something I use a LOT when running pidgin remotely from home 🙂 ). I’ll make sure to prepare an ebuild (in your favourite NX overlay first as usual) when they tag a new version (first released one has some bugs that were quickly found).

Now, you may be lost between the multiple servers (including the dead ones), considering I never blogged about tacix, a remote server using NX, but with a different approach from the ‘official’ NoMachine way (with the specifix ‘nx’ user, …), making heavy use of dbus, and with its own client. For now, it’s still in the early versions, but it has potential!

So which server will you install on your (Gentoo, but other work of course) system? Here are the ‘active’ ones:

• Official NX server (net-misc/nxserver-freeedition in portage), closed-source, limited to 2 concurrent sessions, but has all the features. If you want to quickly try NX!
• FreeNX (net-misc/nxserver-freenx in portage), oldest and most complete open-source version, but its development stalled. The last ebuilds in tree use the branch from the Ubuntu folks, which fixes a few bugs compared to the last upstream source. If you want a stable open-source version
• X2GO (net-misc/x2goserver and x2goclient in portage, some extended parts are still in the NX overlay). Maturing fast, and worth a try. This one is brought to you thanks to Joachim Langenbach, who does most of the work on the x2go* ebuilds 🙂

And in the future:

• tacix, for its simpler architecture (think x2go without postgresql,ldap and friends).
• neatx, which I hope will provide a suitable replacement for freenx soon