Nilesh Kapadia

I was always impressed with Microsoft's RDP protocol and Remote desktop software because it was so fast that it felt like I was using a local machine. I use it to connect to my work machine to do work (rather than try to run things on one my home machines because it ends up being faster than that). I wished that there was something like that for Linux. I didn't particularly like using regular remote X, so VNC was my main option. I looked at NoMachine NX, but I didn't want to pay money for software I wasn't going to put serious use into. There is now a free NX server, called--you guessed it--"FreeNX."

I have not able to find an official home page for FreeNX, but I using this forum thread I was able to use this Debian repository to install it:

deb http://kanotix.com/files/debian/ ./

I also found this page which lists the following repositories but I did not use them:

deb http://archive.kalyxo.org/ staging main
deb http://archive.kalyxo.org/ experimental main

After I got things up and running (at first it didn't work, I had to enable the SSL Encryption option), I was very impressed by it. It's as fast if not faster than RDP (my upstream bandwidth on my cable connection is less than that of my work network, so its even more impressive). In full screen mode, it felt like I was using a local machine. Very cool. I will be using this more often, especially at home between my laptop and Linux box.