Posted by Vince Wadhwani on May 24, 2008

The other day I was playing with Pandora. It's an awesome website but I wanted a way to play it through the remote Ubuntu server I have connected to my stereo. Since that server is headless lots of remote options like xnest and vncserver don't work (without me logging in to the remote server first). I remembered Nomachine's NX server and decided to give it a shot. It works great. Even though the packages haven't been updated for Hardy, the Gutsy packages work fine. Here's how you get it working.

First, make sure you have openssh-server installed on the remote machine. NX operates over ssh so you'll need to be up to date and have the openssh server installed:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Second, you need to download the packages from Nomachine. There are versions for both i386 and x86_64 which you can get from their website. The instructions are pretty straight forward. From this point I'm assuming you're using i386 server so just modify the links based on their website if you're on x86_64.

1. Download the packages: 

wget http://64.34.161.181/download/3.2.0/Linux/nxnode_3.2.0-5_i386.deb
wget http://64.34.161.181/download/3.2.0/Linux/nxclient_3.2.0-9_i386.deb
wget http://64.34.161.181/download/3.2.0/Linux/FE/nxserver_3.2.0-7_i386.deb

2. Install the packages: It's important to do that in the following order so be careful..

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

That'll get your NX Server running on the remote machine. Next up we want to install the client. I'm using Sidux which is a Debian distribution based on Sid/Unstable. If you have a different client the instructions are obviously different.

3. Download the client I'm running a 64 bit version of Sidux on my Dell XPS 1330:

wget http://64.34.161.181/download/3.2.0/Linux/nxclient_3.2.0-9_x86_64.deb
sudo dpkg -i nxclient_3.2.0-9_x86_64.deb

That'll get you installed both locally and on the server but it still won't quite work yet. That's because you don't have your path set correctly. So whip open your favorite editor and add this line to your .bashrc file

4. Open up ~/.bashrc using your text editor and add this line

#EXTRA PATHS
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/NX/bin

Close your terminal and open up a new one and your path should be loaded automatically. You'll then just have to launch nxclient and follow the on screen instructions. If your server is Ubuntu you'll want to override the default KDE desktop with Gnome.

5. Launch NX Client

nxclient

Thanks to the folks at No Machine for making such a great product, maintaining it, and distributing it for free. I hope you guys are successful!

I wrote up a previous howto a long time ago which you can find here