George Wright's Blog: Desktop on Demand NX clients

Desktop on Demand NX clients

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:24:00 +0000

So today I released what is hopefully something very close to the final release of my NX client, but this time as a branded version for Desktop on Demand.

The Windows client has now been tested a lot more thoroughly, and it shouldn’t freeze anymore (due to some lovely hacks… turns out that the Qt/Cygwin build likes to freeze if you’re using the Windows XP native theme engine, so I told it to use Plastique), doesn’t bring up an ugly terminal window and it no longer fullscreens the NX window in all cases.

The OS X client has had minor usability updates as it was all pretty much working beforehand anyway. It’s generally a lot nicer to use and I’ve confirmed it works on both OS X 10.4 and 10.5 (x86 platforms).

The best thing about both these clients is that they do not need installation to the computer; I tested them by putting them on USB flash disks and taking them to friends’ computers and seeing if they’d connect without any trouble - and they did.

Kudos to NoMachine for being incredibly helpful about the NXWin problems; they created a knowledge base article detailing exactly how to compile it and also updated the source packages as the original ones I used didn’t work at all. I’m very impressed with how quickly they got back to me on this!

The clients are now available from here and their md5sums are:

61c3902c6ae4342b23c303425bfb6718 Desktop on Demand.dmg.zip f0d24af8e1900cdc7fd4ab9470245113 Desktop on Demand.zip

As for Linux, I’ve yet to package that; I will be packaging a standalone tarball with the NX client statically linked to Qt. For those of you who don’t like that, there’s always the source code in the FreeNX subversion repository and NoMachine’s site.

"Desktop on Demand NX clients" by RPM

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 03:17:06 +0100

My bad, I should have looked at your code first!

In the code I found where the session data is stored. To run it from a USB drive, I wrapped it in a script that changed $HOME to point to DoD\NX\home.

To get around the Desktop Settings window not launching, I manually added the “.xinitrc” command to the $HOME\.qtnx\session.nxml file.

Nice!

(I might get the code out, muck around with it a bit, and send you a patch or two!)

"Desktop on Demand NX clients" by RPM

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 21:37:44 +0100

Got it to work from Windows to Gentoo+FreeNX for Desktop Type KDE, but I want to use Custom and have it use my .xsession or .xinitrc file. The Desktop Settings button doesn’t do anything. Finally, please save session info to a local file so that this can be a real PortableNXClient solution!

Thanks for the great work, and I look forward to more improvements!

"Desktop on Demand NX clients" by chillin

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:50:12 +0000

I’m looking for an alternative to !Machine’s OS X nxclient, which is very unstable in Leopard, invariably crashes X11 or Xquartz. Alas, I am still on PPC. Can’t you check the button and make your client universal? (ok, not a dev, have no idea how hard it is). Anyway, request: PPC version please!!

"Desktop on Demand NX clients" by George Wright

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:49:22 +0000

Yes, but that’s not going to happen before July. I’m putting all open source devel on hold until after exams.

"Desktop on Demand NX clients" by GeorgesAK

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:36:43 +0000

Sweet! Your client works perfectly on my school machine (Official one doesn’t, I need admin rights). Only thing I would love is if there was support for shadowed sessions. Is it planned for a future release?