Fedora 40 + NoMachine not working

[CRCinAU]

Hi all,

I’ve been trying to fire up a brand new Fedora 40 VM with NoMachine + Virtual Desktop and had nothing but issues.

I either manage to connect, but it tells me there are no desktops available, or say that it can’t create a desktop.

I did a fresh install of Fedora 40 KDE Spin, then installed NoMachine and changed CreateDisplay to 1 and then set DisplayOwner to my username.

Has anyone managed to get a working KDE desktop with NoMachine in Fedora 40?

[Britgirl]

Hi,

your issue could be related to this Trouble Report: https://kb.nomachine.com/TR05V11141.

If you send us the logs from the server side (follow the instructions here) we can verify them. Follow the instructions here and either submit here as a zip or send directly to forum[at]nomachine[dot]com.
https://kb.nomachine.com/DT07S00243.

[CRCinAU]

Hi Britgirl – good to see you’re still active 🙂

I’m not 100% sure that’s the only case. To keep the details in the same place, I did install nomachine on Fedora 39 – which worked perfectly. After installing all the latest updates to Fedora 39, this also broke and seemed to fail in the same way. Fedora 39 is still on KDE Plasma 5.

I will however do a fresh install of Fedora 40 – with no messing around attempting to make it work – and post the logs as requested.

[CRCinAU]

For the benefit of the forum, this is my current status:

1) Install fresh Fedora 40 VM
2) Install nomachine
3) systemctl set-default multi-user.target
4) Add ‘selinux=0 audit=0’ to grub kernel cmd line
5) Reboot

The logs attached are at this point in time.

I note that DefaultDesktopCommand was not set for the KDE desktop.

As such, I then changed the DefaultDesktopCommand in node.cfg to:
DefaultDesktopCommand "dbus-launch --exit-with-session /usr/bin/startplasma-wayland"

Then restarted NXServer via:
root@remote-apps:/usr/NX/etc# ../bin/nxserver --restart
NX> 162 Disabled service: nxd.
NX> 162 Disabled service: nxserver.
NX> 162 Service: nxnode already disabled.
NX> 111 New connections to NoMachine server are enabled.
NX> 161 Enabled service: nxserver.
NX> 162 WARNING: Cannot find X servers running on this machine.
NX> 162 WARNING: A new virtual display will be created on demand.
NX> 161 Enabled service: nxd.

I noticed that the following was set in /usr/NX/etc/node.cfg:

DefaultDesktopCommand "/etc/X11/xinit/Xsession default"

Likely, this wasn’t going to work, so I edited it to:

DefaultDesktopCommand "dbus-launch --exit-with-session /usr/bin/startplasma-wayland"

This kind-of-worked – but things were VERY slow. I then installed the plasma-session-x11 package, and changed the line to:

DefaultDesktopCommand "dbus-launch --exit-with-session /usr/bin/startplasma-x11"

After a reboot, I was able to log in – and this seems to work – which is rather strange, as I couldn’t get this working at all last time – even though I did the above steps as well.

I’m pretty sure that wayland has worked before for KDE – but I’ll keep tinkering to see if / what I can break 🙂

[Britgirl]

Hi,

Glad to know it’s now working, but we can keep this topic open for a while in case you need to report back.

After installing all the latest updates to Fedora 39, this also broke and seemed to fail in the same way.

This could be related to this TR https://kb.nomachine.com/TR04V11131 but it’s hard to say without seeing logs from that server as well.

[Britgirl]

We got the logs and will let you know.

[Britgirl]

Logs don’t pinpoint to a specific issue as such but updating to the next maintenance which is to be released shortly is a good idea. Then you can come back to us if re-encounter the problem.

This kind-of-worked – but things were VERY slow. I then installed the plasma-session-x11 package, and changed the line to:

DefaultDesktopCommand "dbus-launch --exit-with-session /usr/bin/startplasma-x11"

You could also try DefaultDesktopCommand "dbus-launch --exit-with-session startkde"

 

[CRCinAU]

Thanks Britgirl.

It doesn’t look like the KDE Spin of Fedora has a startkde script.

I want to tinker around with the wayland side of things again – as Fedora 41 will not install X11 by default – so trying to update my workflows accordingly.

I might as well do this when the new update comes out as well.

[CRCinAU]

I did just try calling startplasma-wayland – and it seems that everything works ok – except for changing the remote screen resolution to match the NoMachine client session.

It seems to be locked to 1024 x 768 – and I can’t use the client settings to change the remote display resolution.

Swapping back to using startplasma-x11, and this resolution thing works fine.

[Britgirl]

Try v8.12, we’ve just released it.

[CRCinAU]

Thanks – updated to 8.12.12 – and same thing…

Attached screenshots of the difference between using x11 and wayland.

It seems the x11 version uses nxoutput0 as the display, wayland seems to show X11-0 as the display.

Attachments:

1. 

   Screenshot_20240716_230928.png
   

[Britgirl]

Send the other image to forum[at]nomachine[dot]com, it seems to have been too big for the attachment tool.

Now that you’re using the latest version, grab fresh logs the server side and send them along with the image. We’re interested in the startplasma-wayland case, so make sure you gather while reproducing the resolution issue i.e while nomachine is still connected, so don’t close the Player window.

and I can’t use the client settings to change the remote display resolution.

Can you send us a screenshot of the Player menu settings?

[CRCinAU]

Ah – sorry – I’ll compress it to a JPG so that it attaches ok….

Attachments:

1. 

   Screenshot_20240716_231134.jpg
   

[CRCinAU]

Sent logs + Screenshots.

[Britgirl]

We checked the logs and they are clean. NoMachine handles the resize correctly but then the desktop fails to adapt. You mentioned that you have this problem with startplasma-wayland, but not with startplasma-x11. Even when running the Wayland command, the virtual desktop will fall back to using X11 in any case, because that is the only protocol that NoMachine virtual desktops support at the moment. So the recommended command is startplasma-x11.

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