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Wittfella

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2008-05-27

Posts: 462

[SOLVED] FreeNX with fluxbox/openbox/xfce4 WM's

Hello all,

There are many posts here and elsewhere with people having trouble with FreeNX when using the *box and xfce window managers.  I have found out how to make them work very easily and thought I would post here instead of replying to multiple old threads.

For the *box users I assume you are starting your X session by running startx, which parses .xinitrc which contains openbox or fluxbox commands.  The question is what commands do you use in the FreeNX client 'custom' setting to get it to work.  As most people have found, trying 'startx' or 'openbox-session' does not appear to work, and you either get a black screen, or it quits straight away.

Openbox/Fluxbox
Assuming you have FreeNX installed and have sorted out the keys/sshd stuff and can connect to the server, then:-

-  Go to /opt/NX/etc and edit the file node.conf with your favourite text editor (as root).

-  Find the setting #USER_X_STARTUP_SCRIPT about 3/4 of the way down.

-  Remove the '#' from the front of the line and replace whatever is after the equal sign with .xinitrc

USER_X_STARTUP_SCRIPT=.xinitrc

Save file and close.  Thats it for the server. 

Now on the client end:-

-  Configure your connection and under Desktop select Custom from the drop-down that contains KDE etc.

-  Click on Settings and in the first group select the middle option Run the default X client script on server

-  In the second group select New virtual desktop

Click ok and try to connect.  Hopefully it should just bring up your desktop and start working.  I think this works for Xfce4 aswell if your .xinitrc contains the startxfce4 command.

xfce4
Since Xfce4 has its own startup script I also tried out another way and it worked fine.  All I did was edit the node.conf file again and replace the startkde command with startxfce4, and then just select kde from the dropdown on the connection dialog.

/opt/NX/etc/node.conf

replace
#COMMAND_START_KDE=startkde

with
COMMAND_START_KDE=startxfce4

Remember to remove the # symbol at the start of the line.

Last edited by Wittfella (2008-07-01 13:35:08)

Factory

Member

Registered: 2008-02-24

Posts: 108

Re: [SOLVED] FreeNX with fluxbox/openbox/xfce4 WM's

Thanks for the info, Wittfella. I didn't know about the existence of FreeNX until this post! Good info to have. Perhaps you could add this information to the wiki page?

Last edited by Factory (2008-07-01 12:34:56)

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Daenyth

Forum Fellow

From: Boston, MA

Registered: 2008-02-24

Posts: 1,244

Re: [SOLVED] FreeNX with fluxbox/openbox/xfce4 WM's

+1, this belongs on the wiki. Great work!

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