Access virtual desktop with free edition

[ozzie]

I have a home server/HTPC that’s running Debian 12. The GPU is plugged into the TV in my living room and will boot to a Kodi interface, so people can just a grab a remote and watch TV/movies/play games. I want to use NoMachine to access a normal KDE desktop from my Windows PC, and also not be limited by the resolution of the 1080p TV on my 2k ultrawide monitor. I used to (several years, one distro, and some hardware changes ago) have NoMachine running with a slightly modified version of these instructions to use xvfb to create a display :1 and point the nxserver to it, but that no longer seems to work, and I’m not entirely sure why. I also messed around with the physical and virtual display options in server.cfg/node.cfg, but while I successfully prevented access to the physical desktop, I couldn’t get it to start/allow access to a virtual desktop. I’m assuming those settings only take effect with the terminal services. Is there any way to use NoMachine to access a virtual desktop without getting a workstation license?

[Britgirl]

Hi, that article you referenced is for earlier NoMachine versions (you had to manually install a display server like Xvfb) running on headless hosts. NoMachine now ships its own embedded X server to avoid that workaround. Virtual desktop is indeed a feature of the Terminal Server products, but the free edition on Linux allows you to create a virtual display when the x server is not detected (i.e the video card is turned off or NoMachine detects that the X server is not running). The article you should be looking at is this one https://kb.nomachine.com/AR03P00973.

You say that it no longer seems to work. Are you using the latest version 8 of NoMachine? Can you tell us the exact error you are seeing?

[Author]

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