How to get correct resolution when running NoMachine in a VM

[CRCinAU]

For my home lab, I’ve been experimenting with NoMachine to be able to access a VM configured with all my stuff from out and about…

In this VM (operating on Proxmox), the VGA adapter is emulated via qemu…. It seems dumb to then use this as a physical device to set resolutions with – and it’d be a much better experience if I could set the resolution based on the client that is connecting.

It only has to do one session at once – so resources aren’t really an issue….

My question is, as every client device I connect from has a different screen setup, all have different resolutions – which is a royal pain.

How can I decouple the ‘physical’ emulated display from the NoMachine display and get proper resolution handling going?

The ‘server’ in this case and the clients are all Fedora 33.

[Britgirl]

You can change the remote resolution, but only among resolutions made available by the VGA adapter. Turning off the X server on the remote NoMachine server will let it create a virtual display whose resolutions are not limited in any way.

Alternatively, you can install Workstation for Linux on the VM.

[CRCinAU]

Thanks for the reply – I did manage to figure this out by doing:

# systemctl set-target multi-user.target
# reboot

When nxserver starts and a new connection begins, this does create a new virtual desktop and the sizing issues are resolved, yay!

The only part I struggle with now is keeping the nxusb module loaded and active between kernel updates. I’ve played with trying to get the dkms part configured, but I’m not sure how well that works as yet – as I’m still testing a number of things.

Is there any best practice documentation on this topic?

[Giorgi-G.]

Hi,

We already have a feature request for the automatic rebuilding of nxusb.ko module on a kernel update. https://www.nomachine.com/FR01S04064

Until it’s ready, you can manually recompile nxusb.ko module after kernel update https://www.nomachine.com/AR11O00946

Or you can re-install NoMachine after kernel updates and it will be automatically rebuilt.

[CRCinAU]

Thanks!

I edited the included dkms.conf to make it happy with newer dkms versions:

PACKAGE_VERSION=”1.0.0″
PACKAGE_NAME=”nxusb”
DEST_MODULE_LOCATION[0]=”/kernel/drivers/usb/misc/”
AUTOINSTALL=”yes”
BUILT_MODULE_NAME=”nxusb”

I haven’t had a chance to test this properly yet, but I also had to symlink /usr/NX/share/src/uxusb -> /usr/src/nxusb-1.0.0

Then run: dkms install nxusb/1.0.0

In theory, this should work – but I’ll need to run it through a few more kernel updates to make sure…

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