Linux desktop GUI in Windows

Just discovered a fantastic tool to allow remote access to a Linux GUI desktop from my Windows notebok: NoMachine's free NX Server.

While setting up a new server, after the initial basic install, I needed a way to compare the /etc trees of the old and new servers. There are over 500 file differences, so diff with it's unreadable output was not well suited to the task. At least, not by itself. The ideal tool would of course have been Total Commander's fantastic "Synchronize Dirs" command and it's built-in file comparison, but unfortunately that's only for Windows. The indispensable Linux Midnight Commander does have a directory comparison, but it doesn't go into subdirectories, nor does it compare files. Apparently, I needed something like Kompare, Meld or Kdiff3, which are all GUI programs, to get usable directory comparison. So I would have to install KDE or Gnome on a Linux server. That had always seemed pretty weird to me: why install a GUI on a machine which will have no keyboard or screen. Well, the times have changed, and you can now use KDE running on a remote server in some anonymous rack in a data center from your remote Windows machine. (BTW, Meld ended up being my preferred GUI diff tool).

I had first seen NX Server in a menu in Knoppix 5.1. I couldn't get it to work, but it had intrigued me. After spending far too much time struggling to try to get the open source version FreeNX to work on my new Debian Sarge server, I eventually came across this post which suggests just installing the NoMachine version. 10 minutes later, I had KDE running on my Windows notebook! The free NoMachine version is limited to 2 concurrent users, but that is one too many for me anyway.

While I'm still setting that server up, it's in an office with an ADSL link, and a very slow 100 kb/s. upstream speed. Still, I could connect to it from home, and use KDE as if I was sitting in front of the machine. It is orders of magnitude faster than VNC, which I sometimes use to access Windows machines over much faster links.

This technology also opens the door to the use of Linux in Windows offices. While it would be unrealistic to try to migrate most small businesses I know to Linux, it is now possible to add Linux applications running on the server to Windows users.We can now have the best of both worlds.

Download:

NX Client DEB for Linux

NX Node DEB for Linux

NX Desktop Server DEB for Linux

(You have to click a little through these pages to get to the real download link which you can use with wget)

Update: They seem to have grouped these 3 deb files onto the NX Free Edition for Linux page.

Install: (The order is important!)

# dpkg -i nxclient*.deb

# dpkg -i nxnode*.deb

# dpkg -i nxserver*.deb

Before I could install nxclient, I had to aptitude install libaudiofile0.

The server needs to connect to the ssh daemon. I use a non standard port, so I also had to

# perl -i.bak -pe 's/^[#\s]*(SSHDPort|SSHDAuthPort)\s*=.*/$1="MYOTHERPORT"/' /usr/NX/etc/node.cfg

# perl -i.bak -pe 's/^[#\s]*(SSHDPort|SSHDAuthPort)\s*=.*/$1="MYOTHERPORT"/' /usr/NX/etc/server.cfg

If you use AllowUsers in your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file, you need to add the nx user to that line:

# perl -i.bak -pe 's/^[#\s]*(AllowUsers\s*.*)/$1 nx/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config

If you get the error "cannot run startkde" or "cannot start gnome-session", you may need to  aptitude install ksmserver or the equivalent for gnome.