NX - screen for XI was playing around with NoMachine’s NX a bit the other day. My thoughts are “I’m impressed, but…” The display protocol/X11 optimizations do seem to work as advertised. It’s just the interface is somewhat awkward and cumbersome. My goal was to have NX running so I could easily and quickly connect to my existing X session when working remotely (think screen, but for X). The only other options I’ve found are VNC, which is horribly slow on a WAN, and things that start a new X session (like ssh forwarding), which is not what I want. So, for the most part, NX works fairly well. My desktop was incredibly responsive while connected remotely. There were, however, a few pain points that were enough for me to not want to use NX again until they are fixed. Awkward point number one: to be able to connect to an existing session, that session must exist as an NX session. In other words, to use my machine locally, I need to establish a loopback NX connection. This isn’t a huge deal really, as it only really affects the login procedure and I completely understand why it is needed. If this was the only problem, I could easily deal with it. Awkward point number two: after establishing a loopback connection, my keyboard mapping was all messed up. This blog post has explains how to Awkward point number three: resolution only seems to downscale. To be fair, I didn’t spend much time investigating this part. What happened is when I connected from home using my laptop, NX quite smoothly scaled my desktop from 1600×1200 to 1440×900. The problem is when I got back to work and made my loopback connection, it didn’t scale it from 1440×900 back up to 1600×1200. I was just left with a 1440×900 desktop in the center of my otherwise empty screen. All in all, I like the concept of NX (I love screen after all) but until the interface and ease-of-use matches that of plain, old, ssh, I’m not going to be a full-time NX user. If I can type nxclient user@myhost and have it do whatever setup it needs to do in order to give me a full desktop, I’ll switch. Until then, I’m stuck on the console with screen. |
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