So apparently there’s a new way to connect to CDF via NX server.
Kudos to the CDF admin team for laying out some super-easy steps to set up the connection (the setup was surprisingly pain-free on Vista). I got everything up and running in a few seconds. The connection itself starts off a bit slow, but things started to speed up after everything finishes loading (wow, that sounded super obvious, but you guys will know what I mean if you try this out). I even got the Matlab GUI to load, and its a LOT more responsive than when I was forced to use it with X tunneling over SSH.
So I guess 1: yay, no more ssh -Y or -X or -whatever in my Linux VM (for some reason my Mac hates X tunnelling over ssh) and 2: maybe, hopefully?, less late nights in the labs? Ah who am I kidding, that’s just wishful thinking, sigh…