Nx Witness VMS Desktop Client for CachyOS

Build tooling and an installable package for the Network Optix VMS Desktop Client, built from the open-source nx_open sources and pinned to the Nx Witness 6.1.3 release, so it can be installed on CachyOS and other Arch-based distributions.

Network Optix ships official Linux clients only as Ubuntu .deb packages. There is no Arch build, and the .deb cannot simply be converted — it expects Debian library packages and paths. This repository builds the client from source and repackages it with a plain shell installer.

Status: working. Built, installed and connected to a live Nx Witness 6.1.x server on CachyOS (KDE/Wayland, Intel graphics).

source  : https://github.com/networkoptix/nx_open
tag     : vms/6.1.3/release_43301_all
commit  : a49c2c1c254f2758cd16231c1183c2fc93e6d2ba
version : 6.1.3.43301
protocol: 6113        (identical across 6.1.0 - 6.1.3, so any 6.1.x server pairs)
target  : x86_64

Quick start

On the CachyOS machine:

paru -S dpkg libxml2-legacy          # see Prerequisites
git clone https://github.com/DorwardTech/NX-Witness-Client-For-CachyOS
cd NX-Witness-Client-For-CachyOS
./install-on-cachyos.sh

That builds from source, packages, verifies and installs in one go. Budget 1–6 hours for the build depending on core count (72 minutes on 4 cores in testing) and about 25 GB of free disk.

Then launch Nx Witness Client (Open Source) from the application menu, or run nxwitness-client. Connect to https://<server-ip>:7001 with your Nx Witness credentials.

Prerequisites

Package	Why	Where
dpkg	The upstream build's final step runs fakeroot dpkg-deb -b (build_distribution.sh:454)	AUR
libxml2-legacy	The client links libxml2.so.2; current libxml2 provides libxml2.so.16	extra

build-nx-client.sh attempts the AUR install itself and prompts if it cannot. If you would rather not add dpkg, the client still builds — only the .deb step fails — and make-cachyos-package.sh can package straight from the staging tree left behind in nx_open-build/vms/distribution/deb/client/client_build_distribution_tmp/.

CachyOS gotchas

Four things break on Arch that never surface on the Ubuntu hosts upstream targets. All are handled automatically by the scripts; they are recorded here because the failure messages are misleading.

Symptom	Cause	Handling
Invalid setting '16' is not a valid 'settings.compiler.version'	Conan auto-detects the host GCC; conan_config/settings.yml stops at 14.1	Build profile pinned to min(host gcc, 14)
pacman -S dpkg finds nothing	dpkg is not in Arch's official repositories	Installed from the AUR, with a staging-tree fallback
zlib and zlib-ng-compat are in conflict	CachyOS substitutes zlib-ng-compat, which provides zlib	Dependencies resolved with pacman -T, which honours provides
error while loading shared libraries: libxml2.so.2	libxml2 bumped its soname; the package is installed but the soname is not	Depends on libxml2-legacy

The last one is the general lesson: package presence does not imply soname presence. verify-package.sh therefore treats any unresolved soname as a hard failure rather than trusting a package name on the dependency list.

Running the steps separately

./build/build-nx-client.sh                                       # build
./package/make-cachyos-package.sh ~/nx_open-build/distrib/*.deb  # package
./package/verify-package.sh ~/nx-client-cachyos                  # check
sudo ~/nx-client-cachyos/install-cachyos.sh                      # install

build-nx-client.sh is self-contained: it checks disk and network, installs host build tools, fetches the pinned release commit, builds a Python 3.12 toolchain venv, and runs the upstream build. The C++ compiler and Qt are downloaded as Conan artifacts from Network Optix's Artifactory — the host distribution's compiler is not used, which is precisely what makes an Arch build viable.

make-cachyos-package.sh also produces a relocatable tarball, so you can build once and install on other CachyOS machines without rebuilding:

tar --zstd -xf nx-witness-client-6.1.3.43301-cachyos-x86_64.tar.zst
cd nx-client-cachyos && sudo ./install-cachyos.sh

Building a pacman package

For a proper Arch package managed by pacman, rather than the shell installer:

./package/arch/make-arch-package.sh ~/nx_open-build/distrib/*.deb
sudo pacman -U package/arch/nx-witness-client-opensource-6.1.3.43301-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

pkgver tracks the upstream VMS version exactly — <release>.<buildNumber>, so 6.1.3.43301 is nx_open tag vms/6.1.3/release_43301_all. The helper reads it from the .deb filename, so packaging a different build needs no edit.

This is a -bin style PKGBUILD: it repackages the built .deb rather than rebuilding inside makepkg, since a from-source build pulls ~13 GB of Conan artifacts and takes hours. It installs the same layout as the shell installer, plus a .install hook explaining demoMode, and pacman -R cleans up properly.

One nicety of going through pacman: depends=('zlib') is matched against provides, so CachyOS's zlib-ng-compat satisfies it — unlike pacman -S zlib, which is what made the shell installer offer to remove it.

If it does not start

./package/diagnose.sh

Reports the session type, XWayland availability, every unresolved library together with the object that needs it, the ini contents, and a timed launch with QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS=1. The launcher and desktop entry both swallow stderr, so a client that aborts before creating a window otherwise leaves no trace of why.

Repository layout

Path	Purpose
install-on-cachyos.sh	One-shot: build → package → verify → install
release.sh	Tags, builds both artifacts, and publishes a GitHub release
build/build-nx-client.sh	Reproducible from-source build of the client
package/make-cachyos-package.sh	Repackages the built .deb into a CachyOS tarball
package/install-cachyos.sh	Root installer (ships inside the tarball)
package/uninstall-cachyos.sh	Uninstaller (ships inside the tarball)
package/verify-package.sh	Checks a staged package before it is installed
package/arch/PKGBUILD	Builds a pacman package, versioned to the VMS release
package/arch/make-arch-package.sh	Runs makepkg, with a dependency-drift check
package/diagnose.sh	Diagnostics for a client that will not start
docs/BUILD-NOTES.md	Findings, pitfalls, and source citations

Three things worth knowing

1. demoMode=1 is mandatory. An Nx Witness server reports its customization as default; this build is branded metavms. Without demoMode=1 the client refuses to connect with a customization mismatch. The setting is per user, in ~/.config/nx_ini/desktop_client.ini. The installer writes it, and the nxwitness-client launcher recreates it for any other user on first run. A system-wide /etc/nx_ini/ file is not a substitute — nx_kit only falls back there when $HOME is unset. Confirmed sufficient on its own against a live 6.1.x server; developerMode=1 is documented in BUILD-NOTES as a fallback.

2. The UI says "Nx Meta", not "Nx Witness". Branding comes from a Customization Package, and the only one available without a Network Optix developer account is Nx Meta — Network Optix's own developer-edition branding of the same product. It is cosmetic; it is the same client speaking to the same server.

3. Expect a "Beta version" dialog on every launch, and occasional update notifications. The publication type is local, which is not in the set that suppresses the dialog. Automatic updates cannot replace this build, so the notifications are cosmetic — but decline them anyway: an official package would not run on Arch. Move VMS versions by rebuilding from the matching tag.

Releases

Releases are versioned to the upstream VMS release, not independently: the tag is v plus <release>.<buildNumber>, so v6.1.3.43301 is nx_open tag vms/6.1.3/release_43301_all. Knowing the client version tells you exactly which server build it was made to match.

To cut one:

./release.sh                 # reads the version from the built .deb

It builds the pacman package and the portable tarball, tags the commit, pushes the tag, and publishes the release with both artifacts attached (via gh, if installed).

The artifacts are ~300 MB each and are never committed — they are published as release assets. The two GitHub limits are easy to conflate:

	Limit
File committed into the repository	100 MB hard block (50 MB warns)
Release asset	2 GB per file

So the package is comfortably within limits as a release asset, and would be rejected outright as a repository file. makepkg's pkg/ directory alone is ~875 MB, so package/arch/{pkg,src}/ and every artifact extension are gitignored.

Licence

The nx_open sources are licensed under MPL 2.0 by Network Optix. The scripts in this repository are provided as-is for building and packaging that software.