[Parti-discuss] Rootless NX

[lars hofhansl]

I have since discovered that NX can be used in root less mode as well, and that all of the complexity of FreeNX (or NoMachines server)
and NX client, and the cumbersome authentication (nx user and then the real user) is not needed to use NX.

All one has to do it start
  nxagent -display nx/nx,link=wan,...:port :port -R
on the remote (client) machine, and
  nxproxy -S machine:port
on the local (server) machine. If you want secure communication just use SSH to establish a tunnel (display port + 4000 is used by NX),
and use localhost:port on the local server.

No FreeNX, nxclient, public key huh hah, or anything additional indeed is needed.

nxagent acts as an X server (just like Xvfb, Xnest, or Xvnc), and any X application can then be used on the remote machine using the given display port.

That is all that is needed to park and forward windows just like with Xpra. A little bit trickery is needed to handle nxagents 
resume/suspend logic, but on the oher hand that allows changing encoding/caching behavior between suspend/resume cycles.

Anyway, this is not to diminish the ingenuity of Xpra. I just found that using NX this way (with a bunch of simple bash scripts to set the SSH tunnel),
is just as simple as Xpra, windows-aware as well, and performs (honestly) far better over low bandwidth links.