Freenx & desktop sharing

[Derek Broughton]

I've been having a lot of trouble for two or three weeks getting an
acceptable connection to my Linux box from the XP machine at work.  I used
to use VNC and an XDMCP session, which mysteriously broke at that time.  So
I tried Cygwin/X and got the same results.

VNC to a logged in KDE session, shared via krfb worked (in a fashion).  It's
very slow, krfb uses about 30% of the CPU - all the time - and every time
there's a lag, keystrokes seem to get retransmitted, resulting in a lot of
multiple-key presses.
 
I just installed freenx from:
deb http://seveas.ubuntulinux.nl/ breezy-seveas freenx

(Thanks to Dennis Kaarsemaker)

along with the Windows freenx client from NoMachine, and it screams!  It
takes considerably longer to set up the session than VNC, but once
connected I can hardly tell I'm not on my own machine.  All this, and the
connection's encrypted too.

The only small problem I had was figuring out what port I had to open in my
firewall (7000, I think - I haven't actually tested it, I just turned off
the firewall, connected, turned it back on, then looked to see what unusual
ports seemed to be in use).

I'm a very happy camper and hope to see the freenx packages officially in
Ubuntu one of these days.
-- 
derek