KDE / FreeNX / X2Go Debian

We have three Debian based shell servers:

  1. debian.eskimo.com – Debian Wheezy
  2. mint.eskimo.com – Mint 17 Qiana
  3. ubuntu.eskimo.com – Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr

On the Debian server, KDE works with both freenx and X2Go. On the Ubuntu server, KDE works with X2Go but not with freenx. With freenx, after login you’ll get an initial black screen then it exits. On the Mint server, KDE will not work with either freenx or X2Go. On freenx it just exits, with X2Go, you get a wallpaper but no panels or widgets. Right mouse click brings a pull down menu but most of the objects including add panel and widgets do not work. On all of these systems mate gnome and xfce work (although gnome is gnome-fallback and painfully slow, mate is much better).

debian-kde

I have not been able to find anything in system logs or searching with DuckDuckGo or Google that gives me a clue was to why these problems with KDE.  Whatever broke KDE happened some time ago as I re-installed Mint from a backup about a month ago and still the same problems.

Even with Debian, Synaptik complains about an old version of Xinput but I can’t find anything that provides this with synaptic package manager.

I invite any suggestions that may help me determine why this is failing and resolve it.  It’s odd because all three machines are derived from the same code base.