Are you tired of the slow response of VNC or having to tunnel everything through SSH to get secure remote desktop access to your Ubuntu system? Well, NX Free Edition may just be the answer to solve these problems and more.

In this article, I will show you just how easy it is to get FreeNX running on your Hardy Heron system. Ubuntu has been the most popular Linux distribution by far over the last few years according to DistroWatch.com. So naturally, it ought be easy to find instructions to setup FreeNX remote desktop access since it has been around so long, right?

Think again. The information at the Ubuntu community I found very lacking. In fact, I found nothing about FreeNX at all that applied to the latest Hardy Heron release. Being thoroughly frustrated after several failed installation attempts using Gutsy Gibbon references, I determined this blog article was definitely needed.

Rather than show you how to add a new repository to /etc/apt/sources.list and then download some ridiculous encryption key to authenticate using gpg or worse - compile the binaries from source code, I will show you the easy way. Before I begin, however, I will need to point out that SSH is needed prior to installation. If you don't have it installed already, you can find instructions here.

Fortunately, NoMachine has deb packages available hassle free. You will need to download all three packages (client, node and server).

After the downloads have finished, open a terminal console session and change to the directory where the deb packages reside. Then enter the commands in the order that they appear as follows:

• $ sudo dpkg -i nxclient_3.2.0-9_i386.deb
• $ sudo dpkg -i nxnode_3.2.0-5_i386.deb
• $ sudo dpkg -i nxserver_3.2.0-7_i386.deb

If you setup SSH on an alternative port (eg. 2200 instead of 22; always a wise decision), then you will need to edit two configuration files and change the following lines:

Modify /usr/NX/etc/server.cfg

• Change #SSHDAuthPort = "22"
• To SSHDAuthPort = "2200"

Modify /usr/NX/etc/node.cfg

• Change #SSHDPort = "22"
• To SSHDPort = "2200"

Since NX Free Edition requires authentication, you will need to install a key on the client in order to provide a handshake with the server. The next step is to make that key available for users. If the username of the user you want to give access is named joe, then enter the following commands:

• $ sudo cp /usr/NX/share/keys/server.id_dsa.key /home/joe/
• $ sudo chown joe.joe /home/joe/server.id_dsa.key

If other users need access, repeat the above commands and replace joe with the username of the other user.

The final step is to configure the client. The steps to configure the Windows client using WinSCP are as follows:

• 1. Download and install the NX client for Windows
• 2. Download and install WinSCP
• 3. Copy the DSA private key file *
• 4. Configure the NX client for Windows *
• * Note: These instructions are for CentOS but should be identical for Ubuntu. Change the username and domain ip / name to match your system accordingly.

For more information, refer to the following:

• 1. Introduction to NX technology
• 2. NX Installation Guides
• 3. NX Server Administrator’s Guide
  

I hope this article was helpful and please feel free to leave any comments or suggestions.