X2GO open source terminal server project: a nice surprise!

After a long, very long night struggling with NoMachine NX Free Edition for Linux on a Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server. And after that NeatX which has it's own problems, I searched for a alternative for remote desktop use with a Linux desktop.

And I did find X2GO an open source terminalserver project which borrowed some of the sourcecode of NeatX but is a real development on it's own. With a lot of enhancements the Free NX version or NeatX does not have so far. But what I like the most is after installation it's working instantly! And of course they have a lot of desktop clients too, including a Maemo client and a PXE-boot thin client.

One caveat of NX is its use of an authorizationscheme beneath the standard ssh daemon. Default it will allow anyone who has access to ssh but will add another user/password scheme to it. This because it can also be used isolated from any system user besides the nx user. My problem with server/node/client version 3.5.0-4/3.5.0-3/3.5.0-7 was that I could login to ssh, I could login to nx with ssh and NX's public DSA key but not with the NX-client software self. It was bugging me about a public key authorisation error and would not start even when in the logs I could see that my userid already had been authorized. I searched the net endlessly to no avail every solution I already tried. At 3.00 AM in the morning I quite pissed decided it had been enough and I removed NX totally from the server.

This morning I tried NeatX but this did not work either out of the box and removed it too. Maybe to quick and maybe there is a easy way to fix it but I did not intend to spend another day in searching. In my search yesterday for a solution for NX someone mentioned X2GO as a replacement and I though WTH let's give it a try. The only small problem I had were the PGP keyserver not being online so my installed version was not verified by a PGP key. Anything else went well and worked out of the box. The client offers the possibility to login with a username/password or a username/RSA key or a username/DSA key combination. As a bonus it is very fast too, faster then NX as far I can see. Recommended!