NoMachine 6 on headless Ubuntu 18.04 with LightDM + Budgie

[johnburbridge]

I’ll state up-front that this is not a highly technical post. I spent a considerable amount of time trying to get this to work and most of what I’ve learned was through trial and error. I’m simply sharing what worked for me. Batteries not included. Your mileage may vary.

My goal was to install NoMachine 6 on a freshly installed instance of Ubuntu 18.04 with Budgie as the desktop environment (I’m not a fan of Gnome). At first, I just tried to install Budgie and was able to connect successfully but upon connecting, instead of getting the GDM login screen with session options, I’d be logged in directly into Gnome. Logging out would end the NoMachine session and if reconnecting it would launch Gnome again.

My solution to that problem was to uninstall Gnome, remove GDM and re-install Budgie, which defaults to LightDM. Therefore there would be no alternate desktop environment and I’d bypass having to figure out why GDM wasn’t working. Unfortunately it would start-up and die with a rather vague “DEBUG: Process 1455 terminated with signal 6” message.

After a bit of research I found the following:
https://www.nomachine.com/AR10K00725

So, I added the following like to my /usr/NX/etc/node.cfg:

DefaultDesktopCommand “/usr/bin/budgie-desktop”

However, the same problem persisted…. after a bit more digging, I noticed a few lines down:

AvailableSessionTypes unix-remote,unix-console,unix-default,unix-application,physical-desktop,shadow,unix-xsession-default,unix-gnome,unix-xd

On a lark, I decided to whittle that down to just the following:

AvailableSessionTypes physical-desktop,unix-xsession-default,unix-xdm

After making the same change to /usr/NX/etc/server.cfg, I was able to login to Budgie.

Hope this helps someone else!

[kroy]

Thanks for the tip.

Budgie, though currently unsupported. Is similar desktop environment to GNOME and even use their technologies, so removing GNOME after Budgie installation is not recommended.

And as a rule changing AvailableSessionTypes is not necessary. Adding a Budgie path to DefaultDesktopCommand should be enough. We checked it just to make sure and we can definitely confirm this.

There’s another article which goes into more detail about non-default virtual desktop environments, it’s linked in the article you based your research on: https://www.nomachine.com/AR04K00667.

It gives you a load of tips on how to find out what GUIs are installed and what commands to use.

[Author]

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