I’ve been wanting, for a while now, to set up a FreeNX server on my linux box at home, and another on my linux box at work. I’d like to get both my home and work linux systems to the point where it doesn’t matter if I’m at the console or coming in over the network from my PowerBook and I get the same environment. It’s a laudable goal, in my opinion.
This is actually part of another project I’m undertaking at home, of setting up the free VMWare Server on my linux box to create virtual hosts. I’d like to create a virtual image for two Windows XP images (one for my wife and one for me, and yes, I have two XP licenses for this purpose.) I’m thinking at least one or two other virtual images for linux and some other experimentation I’d like to be doing. At any rate, I was figuring, if I can work out how to get FreeNX working, I can have my virtual Linux system make itself public via FreeNX, and each of the windows hosts available via RDP.
In short, I’m swinging very heavily into the “virtualization and remote access are good” camp. Because, well, it’s good. Having ready access to a stable host over low-bandwidth links and being able to disconnect and resume a work session without much in the way of hassle at all is really handy. Ask any sysadmin.
All that said, back to FreeNX. FreeNX is to Unix systems what Citrix MetaFrame is to Windows systems. Snappy, fast remote access to a full GUI desktop. NoMachine sells the Server in a variety of licensing packages, and the clients are available for free. I figured I’d play with FreeNX, since it’s a free re-implementation based on the GPL code that NoMachine released for their products. Basically, if I liked what I saw with FreeNX, I’d strongly consider paying for the commercial version if it’ll get me better support.
I’ve only just now found the proper links for good documentation on FreeNX, so it looks like I’ll have to make a report in the future about how it goes. In the meantime, I’m going to work on installing VMWare Server and cursing my current system install, which is never optimal. 