We just recently converted most of our webservers to CentOS. I had been running in a Windows 2003 server environment for quite a few years. Mostly because I owned licenses and it was easy to find people to manage it. Anyways, I am an old school command line guy that got sidetracked and am now back on track. ALTHOUGH, I have been so spoiled by a GUI that there are somethings that I still feel comfortable running in a GUI. (I’ll Leave that discussion for another time, this intro is already too long).
Anyways, I wanted to install FreeNX and access a GUI without the system being natively in GUI mode (runlevel 5). So, here are my steps that I used to install it to my main server running CentOS 4.4 in a similar config to ( The Perfect CentOS setup from HowToForge - I will blog my installation at another time as well )
Ok… you know I love YUM, so here’s what I did: (commands in bold and italic)
First, I ran yum update to make sure all my packages were current
To install GNOME and X Windows:
yum groupinstall “X Window System” “GNOME Desktop Environment”
Install FreeNX
yum install nx freenx
That’s it on the server side, FreeNX is installed and configured
To get the client working:
Download from your server client.id_dsa.key located in /etc/nxserver
Download the client from nomachine - http://www.nomachine.com/download.php
Run the install and set up your client to talk to the machine and check advanced settings or configure. Under the configure dialog and the server section hit Key and import the client.id_dsa.key file you downloaded. Save and click OK.
Now enter your password and you are good to go…
