After dragging my way through an attempt to get NoMachine virtual desktop software running on my Ubuntu 7.10 server from these instructions, I read down through the comments and came to a comment on how to install it the simplest way: use the instructions on NoMachine’s site. Literally, it was that simple. Unfortunately, when searching for the keywords “install nomachine ubuntu 7.10” on Google, the UbuntuForums site comes up near the very top of the list and so that’s where I started. But it’s literally this simple:

1) From a terminal window, browse to a directory where you want to download the necessary .deb files on your Linux machine.

2) Then, run the following commands one at a time to download the necessary packages (from the same terminal window of course):

wget http://64.34.161.181/download/3.1.0/Linux/nxclient_3.1.0-6_i386.deb
wget http://64.34.161.181/download/3.1.0/Linux/nxnode_3.1.0-6_i386.deb
wget http://64.34.161.181/download/3.1.0/Linux/FE/nxserver_3.1.0-5_i386.deb

3) Next, we are going to run the the commands to actually install the packages we just downloaded:

sudo dpkg -i nxclient_3.1.0-6_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i nxnode_3.1.0-6_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i nxserver_3.1.0-5_i386.deb

After you run these packages (and IF each one finished successfully!), you should now be able to connect to your NoMachine server. Since I am personally running Xubuntu 7.10, in the NX client on my Windows machine, I had to set a specific command to startup my XFCE desktop. I went into “Configure” then in the “Desktop” section, I left the left-hand box at “Unix” and then in the right-hand box dropdown, I set it to “Custom”. Then I clicked “Settings” next to Custom, and under “Application”, I clicked the “Run the following command” radio button, and entered “startxfce4”. I saved the settings and then I was able to connect with no problems. Not bad at all compared to what I was trying to do before to get it to work.