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I'd consider this on topic, as it has to do with consumers switching - Perhaps next time make sure you have SSH access to the machine and you can install the video viewer yourself much more easily than if you'd walked him through it.

If you can't install the viewer via command line, FreeNX is a great bandwidth-friendly, responsive remote desktop solution that runs over your already open SSH port.

As long as their router is set up to forward the port and be available via dyndns, you're golden. Don't take a half hour walking them through it, do it yourself in 15 seconds with a shell script you wrote up last time you had to do this for someone.

Use NX instead of plain old remote DISPLAY or ssh's X11 forwarding or even VNC! It's silly fast! You get a perfectly usable desktop even on slow, high latency connections. The free edition is free as in GPL.

Instead of plain ssh and X-forwarding, you might want to try NoMachine's (http://www.nomachine.com/) NXServer (there's a free-as-in-beer server limited to two login names) or the corresponding full GPL solution FreeNX (http://freenx.berlios.de/). It's basically to X-forwarding what Citrix MetaFrame is to Windows Terminal Services, in terms of compression and speed improvement.
Plus, all you need on the client side is their (free-as-in-beer) client, and not the entire Cygwin install.

It's my understanding (and with some limited experience) that remote X is not very fast, and is a security risk. From what I understand, that's why NX (FreeNX) is so useful... everything is tunneled transparently over an ssh connection, and a lot of the X stuff gets optimized. I guess there's a lot of back and forth communication between the X server and X clients which creates a lot of delay over a network, but somehow NX solves that. The big boast of the NX protocol is that it works great over low-bandwidth, high latency connections. I haven't ever tried it oever anything other than a local connection, so I don't know anything about that, really.

And NX has gotten much easier to install and setup, and will probably get easier. With the latest versions from NoMachine, you have the option of "shadowing" an existing session (à la Windows Remote Assistance) or starting a new session (which was previously the only way to do it).

Have you heard of NX: http://www.nomachine.com/ ? It gives you a remote connection to your desktop using a compressed version of the X protocol.

--Install Nomachine NX on their Linux host, and your remote experience will be even better.

http://www.nomachine.com/

So...uh...how is this not exactly like X?

More specifically, if I installed a chrooted nxserver, and then made a series of launch profiles that I handed out that launched openoffice rather than running anything specific, wouldn't that be the same?

Or is this like that, but also tacking on something like UNO/CORBA/SOAP/DCOM?

This topic seems to be one such that it may be worth mentioning jooreports.

If your goal is to do version control on your content while keeping your layout separate this is probably ideal.

>The parent is right, Hummingbird 's Exceed [hummingbird.com] is definitely what you want.

Welcome in the 21st century, where you can use NX http://www.nomachine.com/ and FreeNX: a lot lot lot faster than any traditional remote X solution (near local speed even over a WAN), sessions standy and resume, sound and printing over WAN. Nomachine has a GPL client and a free as beer server (2 session). Paid versions are unlimited in number of sessions, can do load balancing across different remote machines. FreeNX is based over NoMachine libraries and it's completely GPL.

Remote graphical apps with no huge b/w hit? http://freenx.berlios.de/ http://www.nomachine.com/

After seeing the nerd herd bleating about the unavailability of some feautures the non-open edition has, i'm wondering why no of you supercoders sits down and marries this with this? http://www.nomachine.com/developers.php RDP? Who needs theds that? Come on, code! (And give me something which blows the rest out of the water) ;->

NX

http://www.nomachine.com/

For Linux users, so much superior than X over ssh, or VNC.

There's also FreeNX which is the Open Source version of the same.

Remoting software: Putty is the best CLI one I've ever seen, TightVNC is good for most of my stuff, but I prefer to use RemoteDesktop when appropriate (when I can lock the screen.. yes I know rdesktop is great, not a server tho)

Check into NoMachine's NX, it's higher quality than VNC, though admittedly not quite as simple to operate.

An OS that supports my eight monitor setup easily, stuck on windows

Whoa. You've got me there, the Xinerama configuration for that likely would be a PITA, assuming that whatever videocard you have is even supported by X. If the card(s) are, then it seems to me that the vast majority of the battle could be taken care of by (X|Xorg|XFree86, depending on distribution, but not startx) --configure, then reading the directions. You'll still have parts to do by hand that wont be easy, for instance, matching PCI addresses of the video cards to your actual cards so you can make sure to number the screens in the right order, and you still have to define the Xinerama layout, but at least all of the Cards and Screens should be configured for you. I doubt there's a run-time way to reconfigure them either, but I'm not really up on all the latest whiz-bang stuff in this field.

Scheduler... sorry Sunbird & the like aren't up to part yet

I have yet to figure out just what the heck it is that people want out of their scheduler. It keeps your schedule. You can make it public or private, so that people can see if you're busy. You can send events to other people and get back whether they accepted or not. Reminders. We're beyond the "groupware won't get you laid" hump here, but I'm not sure what's left on the other side. Maybe it's because I don't manage 50 people from my Outlook or something, since I've never used any features out of it that I couldn't seem to do to a Sunbird calendar with Thunderbird.

Backup solutions: OSS is way ahead of the commercial ones here IMHO

[start rant]IMHO, all of the backup software out there is stuck in the dark ages. I have not seen a single one that can properly support writing backups to files on a disk. Every single one of them assumes that you are backing up to tape, and hey, if it's a file, it's still a tape. Take Bacula which I have pretty much decided is the most awesome backup software yet. Its database indexes the files you store so that it knows exactly where on the tape it's at, and can read forward to that section of the tape to get your file back. My full backup comes out as a 1.5GB file, and is written to two USB drives (for redundancy and redundancy).

One day, I needed to recover a file. Just one. So I loaded up the console, flagged it for recovery, and started the recovery as a background job, assuming that bacula would look at the index in the database, seek to that position in the appropriate backup, and give me back my file. 2 hours later, the file was still not back. An hour after that, the file still wasn't there. Finally, I strace'd the storage daemon, and discovered that it was in fact still reading through the entire 1.5GB file off a 5400rpm USB1.1 harddrive, just as if it was reading forward through a tape. Ridiculous. So ridiculous, it was rediculous all over again. But I haven't found a single thing that can do better.

Oh, and what the hell is it with backup software (commercial and OSS) that shits itself entirely if its catalog gets lost? At least Bacula can back up its own catalog and provides tools for (with some manual difficulty) extracting the catalog from a backup file in the event that, God forbid, something happened to the computer you were backing up and the catalog database sitting on the drive was lost with everything else. Or that you want to extract a file from the backup on some other machine.[end rant]

Visio equivalent... dunno

Pfft. Just use openoffice, it's not like the vast majority of those charts aren't made with WordArt anyway.

... is why they are using the essentially useless HTML/HTTP stack with all the addtional layers (JS, AJAX, flash etc.) at all.

There are cross-platform thin-client network solutions like VNC or Nomachine's NX. They do exactly what the web x.0 wants to do, they do it fast and they do it without all the bloat and packing/unpacking of (essentially very simple) data. ... and you can use your favourite GUI toolkit to build applications.

Do not bring up the bandwidth argument before looking at NX first. It runs over really small links.

I also do not think that it allows additional security breaches in principle, as a web browser with all the additional plug-ins is also similar to a very high-level shell to a remote server.

I can't believe this hasn't been already mentioned. You seem to be looking for something like http://nomachine.com/ nx.
All of the advantages of thin clients and optimized for performance.

"You lose 3D, sound, and most of them run a bit slower than native."

Not quite true. Yes, with the 3D. But the two main players (VMware and VPC) both support sound, and VMware even USB 1.1 passthrough.

With the thin-client option, Microsoft Terminal Services (if you're on a windows platform) has good scaling capabilities. Though it might not go into the hunderds or thousands, it should get you into the high dozens. Since most of the microsoft tool's dlls are loaded and shared between the clients, it has pretty good performance.

For linux, while SSH is always a favorite, look at NX-Servers (http://www.nomachine.com/ and http://freenx.berlios.de/) which is like X-forwarding with compression and caching.

It'll be difficult to have a fully virtualized solution. Going with thin clients, or a pxe-served image would be a more viable solution (no matter how beefy your servers and fast your network).

I've tried writley icell and Googles customized homepage and find them all slow as molasses.

The nomachine testdrive service is faster and you get a real desktop into the bargan. Where can I sign up for such a service.

he moment you need to do X over a VPN to allow people in other sites to do the same work, you might as well shoot yourself in the head now and save your users doing it to you in 6 months time.

Use NX or FreeNX as your X.

the Xorg and other x server devs are aware of the problem, and they're working towards solving it.

To put it better, who innovated first? Was is SUN or NoMachine? You can test Linux out via a slow DSL line at http://www.nomachine.com/. A faster one would be better though.

On the other hand, you may wish to give NXServer a try, as it can proxy your Windows Terminal Services servers, and you only need one NXServer per given location to proxy all of your Windows Terminal Services servers.

NXServer compresses the TS data connections, although I'm not sure exactly how much compression you get (I haven't measured). If savings is your main interest, you may want to give NXServer a try. It's from http://www.nomachine.com/

You've just described Nomachine NX.

http://www.nomachine.com/

I work in a company which does mainly Application Server Providing, and we switched about 2 years ago from Citrix MetaFrame (1.8) to Windows 2003.

Printing works well enough, you just have to install all the necessary drivers on the server and make sure the clients use the same drivers (though universal printing engines like ThinPrint and others will work too).

Local drives work like a charm (although only since 2003), you can even copy files with Ctrl+C and then paste it in your local explorer with Ctrl+V (I don't know if the newest Citrix also supports this). Network drives work as expected.

We don't use published applications, and as far as I know Windows doesn't support this. You *can* specify an application to run in the client, but I never used it.

Our customers all connect over the internet, and the performance is pretty much the same as with Citrix. We did some tests with Presentation Server 4.0, and it performs a little better with images because it has a better caching mechanism, but the difference wasn't enough to warrant the (much) bigger licensing costs.

I also tested the NX server from NoMachine, which supports proxying RDP sessions. The site claimed speedups from 2-10 times, although in my experience it was between 1 to 2 times, and because printer and drive redirection needed additional setup, we didn't continue with this. But for X11 sessions NX is currently the best thing (IMHO better than UNIX Citrix).

So, if you only need to provide Windows applications, WTS is a good enough replacement for Citrix. There's also an official client for OS X and an Open Source client for UNIX (which supports RDP 5.1 as well as printer and drive redirection).

This sounds like a job for Linux Terminal Server

http://www.k12ltsp.org/

http://www.ltsp.org/

I actually run this at home, and am writing this post from a VNC enabled Linux Terminal Server. The machines you are using sound old, so if you are willing to invest a little in server hardware, this could be a good option. If you have PXE boot capable network cards, then you can boot from the network into linux. If not then it can also be accomplished with boot disks. For the must have Windows software packages, you can use rdesktop http://www.rdesktop.org/ and setup a windows terminal server. This can get costly, but it works.

The downside to this setup is sound support. Another package out there that is supposedly quite good is no machine http://www.nomachine.com/

I have never used No Machine, but supposedly it is fast, supports sound, and Educational institutions get a 50% discount on the cost.

If you have any spare hardware kicking around, I would setup a Linux Terminal server and see how you like it. All it would take is one spare workstation that you can wipe and set up with linux. You could then easily enable all of your current machines to boot to the terminal server from floppy, and give it a trial. If it looks like it would fit the bill, then get a real server for it so you don't suffer from speed issues.

Cheers,

CB

Any ISP could use NX (from NoMachine [nomachine.com]) to create a "Desktop on the Internet". NX makes X Windows and/or MS Windows fast, so that an ISP could set up servers and serve a remote desktop over the Internet. NX uses ssh so it is secure and the ISP could provide encrypted disk space. All the needed applications would be on the ISP server. The PC would become a thin client. The ISP could provide a way to rsync all the changes back to your PC if a storage medium was available (hard disk, usb flash drive, ...). The only disadvantage of NX is that it does require a client program.

Their goal turned out to be the creation of a piece of software later called Fog Creek Copilot, which would help techies fix customers' or relatives' computers by giving them remote access to the ailing machines.

Great idea! Take an idea that already exists, in several variations, and create yet another incompatible implementation. When it fails, you can always fall back on the movie!

None of your arguments above are valid.

Remote Desktop Access - NX Server http://www.nomachine.com/ http://freenx.berlios.de/
When I switch VT's on my Gentoo box every VT has a logon prompt. KDE3.4 and some earlier versions have sessions and easy user switching. As to the bottom part there are the various hotplug daemons that autoload kernel modules and if you are actually talking about upgrading the version of a module then usualy you are compiling a new kernel as well which will require a reboot anyways.

I've been wanting something like this so I can use the X Windows System like it was designed. http://www.nomachine.com/documentation/html/intr-t echnology.html
If it is capable of being docked, or accept a keyboard+monitor being attached, then it is perfect for me.
From what I've read about it http://www.internettablettalk.com/content/view/98/ 37/ it seems to be just as customizable as any GNU/Linux/X system.

1) Install a second NIC or connect the modem directly to the server. Connection to the Internet should be though the server and connection to the Office should be though a VPN on the server.
2) Install a new IDE Hard drive in a 3.5" removable rack and tray. The drive should be than big enough for the operating system (Linux of course) and copies of some of the local desktop partitions. A telecommuter can shut down the server and bring in the HD during the day to resync and repair.
3) Install DHCP demon to allocate local IP addresses, DNS and gateway settings. If the desktops are network boot capable then install TFTP to remotely boot KNOPPIX via PXE. IF the desktop OS is constantly crashing, the user can select PXE boot, network KNOPPIX. The user can then be instructed over the phone to enable ssh server to allow remote repair and reimaging of the desktop partitions from copies on the local server.
4) Partition the desktops with as small as required C: ( or in the case of Linux the root ) partition for software. When software is install, use dd and netcat via live KNOPPIX to copy a snapshot of the partition to the server. You can allocate the remaining free space as a persistant partition where documents are stored. ( Consider hireing someone who knows how to customise Knoppix for your setup.)
5) Install/Enable VNC on all the platforms, but only allow incoming connections from the local server ( which is redirected over a SSH tunnel ).
6) For local backup, create share directories on the desktop accessable by the server. On the local server create loopback encrypted file systems, unmount and copy the images to the desktops shares in chunks, using redundantcy if enough space is available on the desktops. Checksum ( MD5 is enough ) each piece.
7) If the network load to the Office is takeing up all the available internet bandwidth or the connection is just too slow then install proxy servers on the local server and consider using a distributed filesystem ( OpenAFS is still the best ) .
8) If phone charges are eating into the budget, and the internet connection is good enough, then install Asterisk on the local server ( upgrade the server to a Celron 800Mhz or better ) and a card with enough FXS ports for each local user. Don't bother with software based phones/headsets. The phone will work when the desktop does not.
9) Set up a Linux server at the Office that operates as a thin client application server. Allow remote access though both FreeNX and VNC. Create login accounts and logins that operate as virtual meeting rooms, with multiple users logging in via VNC. Use VNCserver with a screen size of around 1000x600, that will operate via a VNC viewer on any 1024x768 desktop. Use phone based conference calling for voice -- it's a lot less hassle for the users
10) Add the ususal list of cross platform applications: Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, OpenOffice etc.

Do the open ten step and save yourself and your santity from all those hours driving from site to site.

Here's an Idea to speed up OpenOffice deployment.
OK, buy one big server for your network. Install Linux.
Set your use flags.
Install NoMachine http://www.nomachine.com/

Install NoMachine clients on the Windows and Linux workstations.

Create icons on the desktops that will launch the application from the "Big Server" to the clients.
Walah! You have a method for improving the deployment speed of new applications throughout your network from a single place.

Let's look at Gentoo's approach of compiling OpenOffice to see if there are ways of increasing the amount of shared RAM that is used by OpenOffice. Maybe making it less of a static application would help. Then another way to improve execution speed it to introduce a tool called prelink.

Hey, at least we have the application. It is solid and it is free. Now you know ways to deploy it without upgrading all your workstations.

-Joe Baker

run the windows network behind a linux box without a default route(so they cant talk to anything outside the local network).

anyone who wants to access the internet can run apps off the linux box with X11. make an alias to a bat file on the users desktop for the icon, (you can set properties and change the icons on an alias, as opposed to the bat file itself) they click on the big blue 'e' and they dont need to know that firefox is actually running from a differnt machine and only displaying in front of them.

ive been doing this recently in various ways, usually involving ssh (putty or openssh). a few years ago it was with just the ssh and xfree86 that came with cygwin. there are many X servers for windows, ill let you figure out which X server you like. putty is actually kinda slow (but otherwise, great), all the openssh for windows projects i see are repackaged bundles of cygwin, but they work.

and, of course, theres NX...

the easiest way to do sound is simply plug the speakers into the linux box. i guess you could use esd (theres a java one and the NX one, see above) or some similar noise redirector but so far, no ones asked for noise, and speakers in the linux box work fine for my own use, so i havent really looked into it.

if you want to make uploads/downloads easy, just use samba to make a shared folder.

the included openssh and X11 on a mac way outperforms any X server ive tried on windows, even the big apps feel local over ssh over wifi(802.11g).

of course, this is for "knowledge worker" offices and the like. its the last thing youd want in a design / fx / game studio for example. users in such environments tend to take care of themselves anyway.

but for networks where this does work, security is pretty tight...

Your theory about the speed differences of RDP and VNC is interesting, but wrong.

--> VNC sends the complete pixmap of the screen, pixel by pixel: the complete image, if you want.
--> RDP sends the screen drawing commands to the client: the instructions how to draw the sceen.

And because it is done in a clever way, RDP is faster.

The reason why X11 over the network so such a pain is because the X11 applications send too many roundtrips. An interesting article about this can be found at LinuxJournal.com.

BTW, NX and FreeNX do also send drawing commands instead of pixmaps -- and they are even faster than RDP. Plus, they do work cross plattform too:

I regularly use NX and FreeNX from Windows to KDE, from KDE to Windows, from Mac OS X to KDE, from KDE to Mac OS X, from KDE to KDE, from Windows to Windows, and from Mac OS X to Windows (oddly, it doesnt work from Windows to Max OS X) (yes, the bad part of my self tried to suppress the info "from KDE to Gnome, and from Gnome to KDE" -- which I do not use as often, but which is possible too).

You know what? I also can print across these sessions, to my local printer (whereever "local" might be in each case). And I can also copy and paste from local window to remote window and from remote window to local window. VNC would do none of these in any one of those scenarios.

It's your turn again, dear Gnome friend!

Here's a clue for you: Nomachine NX. It's a compression and buffering solution for X11 which makes it as fast and responsive as RDP(Windows Terminal Server). Even handles print and has some support for audio. They claim that it's perfectly comfortable to work with over a 56.6kbps line, though I haven't tested it against less than a server connected to the net with a slow ADSL line, on which it was perfectly usable.

The core is GPL, the client is free, and even though the server costs money, there is a free implementation of it, called FreeNX.

Google or any ISP could use NX (from NoMachine) to create a "Desktop on the Internet". NX makes X Windows (and MS Windows) fast so that an ISP could set up servers and serve a remote desktop over the Internet. The ISP would provide encrypted disk space and all the needed applications. The PC would become a thin client. The ISP could provide a way to rsync all the changes back to your PC if a storage medium was available (hard disk, usb flash drive, ...). As one travels, one would still have access to the desktop and all one's files.

It's not just about web-based delivery, though Google's eye may be on that ball. A server farm delivering Open Office through a compressive technology like NX would be within Google's capability and, if it caught on, would make them Masters of the Universe (TM).

That would be VERY scary to Microsoft, not to mention a whole bunch of other players in the market. NX delivers a pretty good desktop experience (if you aren't a game player) in around 5KB/s of bandwidth. If that were guaranteed virus-free, with backed-up storage for a modest monthly subscription - like a Hotmail or Yahoo but doing your computing not just your email - I know a lot of people who would sigh with relief, happily accept a lightweight thin client and throw out that hideous, malware-ridden fat-client piece of junk in the corner that they never understood and rarely worked properly.

Figaro's Password manager(http://fpm.sourceforge.net/) is an encrypted password storage solution that can store many passwords, and you could use one password to store it. It only runs on Linux. However, you could use NX (http://www.nomachine.com/ to give users remote access to it.

I just add a bit on that list from top of my head.
Although I think the listed app goes beyond what the so called 'average pc user' wants, but there goes...

1. Konqueror ( http://www.konqueror.org/ )

2. Email - Sylpheed ( http://sylpheed.good-day.net/ )

3. I think Evolution is more like in this place.

4. Lately "Sound Juicer" is taking more attention too

5. VideoLAN aka VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/ ) and Ogle ( http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/ ) [and Goggles ( http://www.fifthplanet.net/goggles.html ) for Ogle GUI wrapper] for DVD watching.

6. There are plenty way to do this, but the typical ones could be 'Jinzora' ( http://www.jinzora.org/ ) and 'MusicPD' ( http://www.mpd.org/ ), even plain Apache does it fine too, in a way.

8. If you want easier to manage iptables wrapper, Shorewall ( http://www.shorewall.net/ ) and there are other wrappers too.

9. KOffice ( http://www.koffice.org/ ) and by individual components, Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ ), Gnumeric ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/ ), Gnucash ( http://www.gnucash.org/ )

10. Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) or Sodipodi ( http://www.sodipodi.com/ ) for vector graphics.

11. Miranda ( http://miranda-im.org/ ). Windows only.

13. Hmm , Samba? ( http://www.samba.org/ ), WedDAV (Look parent post), FTP (plenty ftp daemons, ex : http://www.proftpd.org/, http://vsftpd.beasts.org/ etc)

16. GPhoto ( http://www.gphoto.org/ ), EOG ( http://www.gnome.org/ ? ), GQView ( http://gqview.sourceforge.net/ ). The latters are for just viewing mainly.

20. FreeNX ( http://www.nomachine.com/ , http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) http://www.poptop.org/ ), L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tpd ), RP-L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/rp-l2tp/ )

24. Postfix ( http://www.postfix.org/ ), Sendmail ( http://www.sendmail.org/ ), Exim ( http://www.exim.org/ ), Cyrus ( http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/ ), Xmail ( http://www.xmailserver.org/ ), qmail ( http://www.qmail.org/ )

25. Spamassassin ( http://spamassassin.apache.org/ )

26. Same as above.

27. XSane ( http://www.xsane.org/ ) for sane frontends.

30. Buzzmachines ( http://www.buzzmachines.com/ ) I could be wrong...

31. 'various GUI frontends' - X CD Roast ( http://www.xcdroast.org/ ), K3B ( http://k3b.sourceforge.net/ )

32. Don't know any opensource ones...

Seeding lots of torrents on a server is somewhat annoying to do in that, as far as I can tell, there's no good non-GUI tool for seeding a bunch of torrents and capping their total bandwidth usage. I've been using NX to run Azureus remotely (NX will let you disconnect from a running X client and reconnect to it later from a different X server, pretty nifty) which works but is a real memory hog and even with NX's acceleration is still sometimes kind of painful to administer because you have to navigate the remote GUI.

The Osprey site still seems very light on technical details, but I'm hoping its Permaseed component will let me cut way down on the couple hundred megabytes of memory I'm using for my seeding, not to mention make it easier to offer up my server as a semi-permanent seed for other people's torrents.

I look forward to checking out this new software.

I think a much better approach for cross platform interactive web applications is through the NX technology from Nomachine http://nomachine.com/ It allows the full richness of a desktop app over a modem connection with easy deployment through a browser plugin. The app doesn't even need to be especially written for the web and the performance is simply amazing. It is also completely cross platform as the app runs on the server and remote displays to the client. There is also a free server and all the smart compression libraries are under GPL.

I think a much better approach for cross platform interactive web applications is through the NX technology from Nomachine http://nomachine.com/

It allows the full richness of a desktop app over a modem connection with easy deployment through a browser plugin. The app doesn't even need to be especially written for the web and the performance is simply amazing. It is also completely cross platform as the app runs on the server and remote displays to the client.

There is also a free server and all the smart compression libraries are under GPL.

The most common reason I hear for why we just HAVE to give so many people, e.g., CD-burners is "they need to take data home to work on it..."

I keep wondering - wouldn't it be simpler to set up a "Windows Terminal Server" and have remote employees use THAT instead? That way, the only data leaving the company are (presumably encrypted) screen updates and key presses (yes, you CAN transfer files directly through the same mechanism, but how often would you legitimately need to if you can operate your "official" company computer from wherever you are instead of working off of some spyware-infested "home" computer directly?)

On a related note, anyone know how well the NoMachineNX RDP proxy would handle this sort of thing? Sure seems like it would be better than a more heavy-handed "VPN" connection that seems popular right now if it works effectively. Rumor is that it works reasonably well even on dial-up links, but I'm having trouble puzzling out how to set up to do RDP proxying from the various documents I've found so far.

For cases where someone really does need to make a CD of data to send to someone legitimately, perhaps a centrally located CDR "printer" with a web interface (perhaps something like this? Though I'd swear I'd seen more recent implementations of this concept using PHP) that users would send the files they need burned to, and the central box would make a record of what was being burned. (Ought to make the auditors happier, anyway).

Just my own thoughts on the problem.

why is it better? because it's not microsoft, right?

Because it's a shitload faster, useable on a 14.4kbps modem.

http://www.nomachine.com/sources.php

It can even be used to encapsulate Remote Desktop & VNC from a central box. Then you can ssh into box1 and have box1 rdp into box2 over X for free.

http://www.nomachine.com/store.php -- its licensing isn't completely open.
if you aren't running an X server on your client machine, you have to use RDP or VNC anyhow.

Yeah, but Nomachine NX is better than both, and it's open source too. I've been running it for a year, and I've been really impressed:

Information
Sources

Yeah, but Nomachine NX is better than both, and it's open source too. I've been running it for a year, and I've been really impressed:

Information
Sources

WINE/CrossOver uses the networked X wire protocol which can be piped through a encrypted ssh or a third party encrypt/compression system like the NX Terminal Server system. In combination with some of the newer dual/multi processor servers, a Office->WINE->NX pipe line can provide a better service to more people than the same hardware hosting Microsoft Terminal Server.

Soooo.... if it has X11 technology -- can it also run an NX client?

If it does, any internet connection would present the opportunity to me to also connect to my FreeNX or my NoMachine NX server... (Yes, I run _both_, and they are great!)

Soooo.... if it has X11 technology -- can it also run an NX client?

If it does, any internet connection would present the opportunity to me to also connect to my FreeNX or my NoMachine NX server... (Yes, I run _both_, and they are great!)

NX is better than VNC because of the fact it uses the X protocol means it can take advantage of any local hardware acceleration on your local workstation (the faster than local effect I'm talking about). NX is better than plain remote X because it reduces or eliminates the level of needless roundtrips between server and client needed to do common tasks, and uses JPEG compression to send large bitmapped objects. Also, it runs over SSH, so it's completely encrypted unlike either VNC or plain remote X.

(No, I don't work for NoMachine. But if I ever needed to set up a Linux terminal server, I'd buy their software.)

Guys, autopackage http://autopackage.org/ or something like it, is the key in software installation in my view. I feel so bad when I see some "Linux specialists" dismiss it as a non starter, yet to Joe SixPack, it does not matter. Linux will be no where even in a generation if it requires software authors to write n packages for n distros. When one visits Nomachine http://nomachine.com/, you find a single windows binary and several Linux binaries, and that does not guarantee successful installation on all distros. Such a situation is very very frustrating. Guys, let's jump onto autopackage and let Linux fly.

My question is " How is this different from NoMachine's NX Server?"

NoMachine and their NX server also allows you to testdrive a linux desktop on windows, over a remote connection. I found my FreeNX server usable even over dial-up, and could show my parents what my linux desktop looked like, and think it might be a useful migration step for some users. It's even bundled with Knoppix.

in related news, NoMachine's NX just hit version 1.5 (release with link to download).

Badass X proxy for remote X. Desktop over 56k? Sure.

Rootless mode got a lot of attension in 1.5. Still some major problems, but much better. Before you used to have to run it in a window.

Myren