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<p>Hi</p>
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<p>On Donnerstag, 5. Juli 2007, Leopold Palomo-Avellaneda wrote:</p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> Hi,</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">></span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> I'm new in the list and I would like to help in the packaging of freeNX.</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> Yesterday I met to Fabian Franz (FreeNX author) and we have been talking</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> about FreeNX.</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">></span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> He is preparing a new structure for the code and I asked him about the</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> problems of having freeNX in a debian box. It's strange but there are</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> random people trying to make packages of freeNX and this group, but</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> nothing more or less stable.</span></p>
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<p>FreeNX is the least of the problems, although it begs to question if it is consistently maintained (it certainly wasn't in 2006). </p>
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<p><span style="color:#008000">> FreeNX it's only some scripts that use the nx-core from Nomachine. This</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> core is gpl and freeNx too, so by now there's no problem about licenses.</span></p>
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<p>What is seriously required here is upstream work, to get rid of private source copies/ forks, which first means distinguishing changes from upstream, trying to merge differences at their respective upstreams (no chance for the X related parts, as those are distributed under the GPL2-only, the same goes for nxssh versus OpenSSH - although this fork can probably be reverted) - unfortunately NoMachine hasn't been very receptive to patches in the past.</p>
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<p><span style="color:#008000">> The source code of nx-core, I have to addmitt that I have found it like a</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> mesh. There's a lot of packages and the main package nx-x11 it's a part</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> of the xfree/xorg. Fabian told me that nx-core 2.x is based on "some"</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> version of xfree, but the new one nx-core 3.0 is based on "some" version</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> xorg.</span></p>
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<p>The real serious issue are the NX libraries, which (still with NX 3.0) duplicate a lot of code from other upstream projects:</p>
<p>- the whole X source tree (X.org 6.6 this time, instead of a radom XFree86 4.3 development snapshot in the past)</p>
<p>- esound 0.2.36, in comparison to an ancient pre- woody version until now</p>
<p>- samba 3.0</p>
<p>- GKrellM 2.2.10</p>
<p>- OpenSSH 4.4p1</p>
<p>TightVNC and rdesktop forks have fortunately been dropped with NX 3.0.</p>
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<p><span style="color:#008000">> I don't understand the svn of pkg-nx group. I see that is only the debian</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> part, but in the freeNX I think that it's the source code of the project.</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> So, please, could someone explain me the structure and the main idea?</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> Because in this repository is where the source of nx have to go or only</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> the debian files?</span></p>
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<p>Getting the sources to build and "run" isn't easy, but can be made possible in reasonable time, getting it into a state for debian archive inclusion is next to impossible without *serious* changes. That's probably the reason for most stalled attempts at packaging NX.</p>
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<p><span style="color:#008000">> Also, there's a project of a free client</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> http://code.2x.com/linuxterminalserver/downloads</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> with a GPL licences that it will be interesting to add to the project.</span></p>
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<p>In that public svn is not only the client and library parts, but also the perl based and mature nxnode/ nxserver 1.5 source under the GPL2, 2X Software Ltd. is also very receptive to patches (including svn write access) and easily reachable.</p>
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<p>My personal plan was to get 2X NX 1.5/ 1.6 to build following FHS path names last year (very, very initial hacking here: http://sidux.com/files/wip/), with the prospect of slowly merging in changes from more current updates of NoMachine's GPLed sources and trying to trim down private copies of forks from other projects - until I hit the limits of my barely existing perl knowledge (nxnode/ nxserver's build system has a lot of non-FHS compliant hard coded paths and other issues) and serious time constraints.</p>
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<p><span style="color:#008000">> Well, there's a lot of things to do, but I hope that soon we will have</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> some kind nice debian packages of the freenx project.</span></p>
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<p><span style="color:#008000">I "hope" that too, but it requires a lot of hard work (measured in months, not days or weeks) and actual code commits to get any closer to reality.</span></p>
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<p><span style="color:#008000">> Regards,</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">></span></p>
<p><span style="color:#008000">> Leo</span></p>
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<p>Regards</p>
<p>        Stefan Lippers-Hollmann</p>
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