Norwalk LUG May Meeting FreeNX Presentation for the Norwalk LUG May Meeting May 7, 2014 by Chris Habasinski

FreeNx – What is it? A remote display technology which provides near local speed application responsiveness over high latency, low bandwidth links Requires a server and client component Use it when you need to run GUI Linux apps over a remote connection – including a full remote desktop Also works on the LAN Resources: http://freenx.berlios.de/ http://www,nomachine.com http://opennx.net

FreeNX – Who is it? The core libraries are GPL'ed by NoMachine FreeNX is the GPL implementation of the NX Server and Client NoMachine provides a free 2 client NX Server FreeNX has no usage limitations OpenNX is the client implementation – compatible with the NoMachine client

FreeNX – Key Features Fast Secure – uses ssh Session resilience Supports remote audio and printing Clients for Linux, Windows, MacOS and Unix (NoMachine, OpenNX, plugins (Remmina)

FreeNX - Alternatives VNC RDP Remote X11 Exceed on Demand Xephyr (Mac OSX)

FreeNX – How it Works http://openfacts2.berlios.de/wikien/index.php/BerliosProject:FreeNX_-_NX_Components NX Compression: NoMachine have developed their own compression algorithm for X traffic. This is about 10 times more efficient than generic ZLIB compression, while using only one tenth of ZLIB's CPU cycles. This is the first secret for NoMachine's NX speedup. NX Caching: NoMachine have also developed a very intelligent caching mechanism for X11 traffic. It produces a quite big "hit rate", sparing the transfer of the same data repeatedly, and restricting the transfer of similar data to a "differential transfer" only. This is the second secret for NoMachine's NX speedup. NX Roundtrip Suppression: Before NX there was no known method to suppress X11 roundtrips over remote links reliably and in a robust way. NX can do that by translating X11 traffic at the remote end (occuring from application to nxagent) into NX protocol traffic. This is the third secret for NoMachine's NX speedup. Overall efficiency: All 3 methods combined are able to achieve a 70-fold efficiency of working with a remote X11 GUI using the highest level of compression over low bandwidth/high latency links. (Note: the "Modem" compression type [as shown in the NoMachine NX Client GUI] is the best compression, "LAN" setting does no compression at all. You can use "modem" compression in LANs for better efficiency.)

FreeNX – Installation & Configuration Ubuntu Add repo Install Download separate setup utility Configure – authentication, session options CentOS Install (in the default repos) Soalris requires 3 packages to be installed. In order: nxclient nxnode nxserver

FreeNX - Tips Configure to use key authentication Do not use the default keys Add '-norender' option to AGENT_EXTRA_OPTIONS_X OpenNX client and NoMachine client package files overwrite each other – use one of the other XQuartz (v 2.7.5) bug in MacOS 10.9 prevents Xephyr from starting up a nested X session – use OpenNX

FreeNX – Administration nxserver command – run as administrator start | stop | status | restart list listuser, adduser, password, deluser terminate, force-terminate suspend cleanup