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Citrix-Like Server for Linux?
Devil's BSD asks: "My school is planning to add remote desktop access so that people can easily access a school computer from home. However, with the financial situation in our Kentucky being what it is, using Citrix Metaframe for Unix/XP and buying all the software licenses necessary will be extremely hard. And with the state department of education (ironically named KDE) very pro-Microsoft, VNC is out of the question. Is there a free or low cost Citrix-like software suite that can give access to a remote desktop and compress the datastream to be able to work on a 56k modem like Citrix's ICA does?"
Based on the headline, the answer is The X Window System. Sweet Jebus, have you only been using Linux for a week or something?
However, based on the actual article body -- I have no answer. What the hell are you blathering about? What is the server OS you're using? What is the client OS you're using? If you can't use VNC, whey the hell would you be able to use any other solution? Could you re-state the question please, but in a comprehensible manner this time?
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Why is VNC out of the question?
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
VNC works just fine in a windowswindows configuration. TightVNC compresses vnc pretty well. Remember to keep the color depth down as that can have huge impacts on performance over low bandwidth.
While I'm not sure if it's specifically what you're looking for, there is the Linux Terminal Server Project. It works like Winframe but I don't think it's directly compatible with Citrix ICA. But is is on version 3.0 and a few people I know have used it -- I tried it once for a terminal my house but it was a little overkill for just wanting to make a web terminal for the living room.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
And with the state department of education (ironically named KDE) very pro-Microsoft, VNC is out of the question.
Doesn't that same logic rule out Linux as well?
I would think that VNC or a variation of it running on Linux would solve the problem nicely with the support of multiple virtual desktop running on a single machine.
http://www.realvnc.com
http://www.tightvnc.com
VNC is the answer. Your boss is a moron if the only reason is "it's not MS".
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I forgot that /. takes out the <---> in windows<--->windows by default.
Was plain old X11 even considered? If it was, and it didn't meet the criteria, then in what way was it found lacking? Too heavy for a 56k dialup connection? I didn't think it was any worse than Citrix there, but I could be wrong about that. You should be able to get a secure connection via SSH tunneling, and that connection can be compressed if necessary -- there is copious documentation for all this, so I won't repeat how to set it up here, but it's very commonly done.
The biggest "obstacle" I can think of is that people will need the X11 server software on their end, but again this isn't a very big deal: there are free versions for Windows (Cygwin and MacOSX (Apple's X11 beta, XDarwin), and of course it is the standard graphical layer for Linux & related systems.
So really, what needs to happen if you go forward with this idea is for some work to go into packaging it up for students & faculty to use, and giving enough training to show how to get going with it. There are a lot of resources out there that can be relied upon, should the state choose to take this path. It sounds to me like what you need most is for someone to make the pitch to those who are making the decisions.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
There's no such thing as a stupid question. But there ARE stupid people. Mebbe you could 'splain how "pro-M$" rules out use of VNC.
skip lewis
Check out CrossOver OfficeServer Edition.
:)
Runs M$ Office on a Linux 'terminal server'. You still have to buy the M$ Office licenses and the OfficeServer software, but it's hella-cheaper than Citrix.
100 users for Crossover OfficeServer is something like $5,000 where Metaframe XP (with Windows CALS and Terminal Server CALS) for 100 users would be something like $60,000. You do the math
Check out Tarantella . Similar to Citrix MetaFrame, but less expensive, and runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX.
I am using:
http://www.rdesktop.org/
You sill need to pay microsoft for remote
access licenses on server side thought.
in fact, I use it as a hack to get a 'persistent desktop'.
the idea is to run vncserver on a 7x24 server class box. bsd is good and even linux is ok [grin].
then run your viewer on some rebootable box. ie, a box that you might reboot into windoze or whatever. in my living room, where I don't want a box running all the time (noise), I shut my 'viewer box' down when I'm done for the nite. I just exit vncviewer and shutdown the box. then the next day I boot it up, run vncviewer again and my 'desktop' is there, just as I left it!
in fact, I can run in -share mode and have MANY viewers (in diff areas of the house) all watching the same desktop. great for mail (ELM) windows where you can normally only run one instance of those per mbox but with vnc, I can watch mail in any room that I have a viewer/computer running. move the mouse in one and it moves in the others in lock step.
going from win to unix is one degree of uptime/stability. going from unix local-desktop to unix vnc-remote-desktop is yet another degree. you can have a desktop 'uptime' of months and months, even if you belong to the linux kernel-of-the-month club. or are hacking with funky hardware and linux hangs on firewire or usb (oops). simply reboot and re-run the viewer and you didn't lose your desktop or state!
its amazing. that feature, alone, converts many unix users from local desktop style to vnc remote/local style.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Now, if you are trying to avoid paying for the ICA client, but you are willing to pony up the money to Microsoft, then there is a client named rdesktop that does the Microsoft remote desktop protocol (RDP). It was reverse Engineered from scratch, and supposedly is reasonable stable. So now, you can run this on Linux desktops, but you still have to pay Microsoft a bunch of money for the apps (just because they are all running on one server, doesn't get you out of paying them for as many concurrent users as there could be).
Now, if you have to have Microsoft Applications, but not a Microsoft desktop, you might want to see the guys who develop the Crossover stuff. Now you can run a lot of Windows Apps on a Linux box that has a Wine processes running remote. The product is called Crossover Office Server Edition I don't follow the legality of this, so get a real good lawyer before you try it out. looks like CodeWeavers is saying, you get to pay Microsoft a bunch of money.
This is probably roughly the same quality, but now your talking about using X for your network transport. Which is a little awkward for remote users, as they will have to run an X server. Cygwin ships with one for Windows desktops.
Now, if all you want is a bunch of desktops you can run remote from a linux server. Get a bunch of machines that can act like X-Terminals. A bunch of old cheap PC's with a good NIC will do the job, as long as the NIC will do PXE, or netbooting of some flavor. Go get PXES from sourceforge and run it. It will net boot, and run rdesktop, a Citrix ICA client, or run as an X Terminal for you. It is very good, and runs pretty well. This is what the city of Largo, FL does. They claim it's great, grand, glorious and best of all, dirt cheap.
I don't understand your requirements. They appear to be directly contradictory. We have to have cool stuff from Microsoft, but we can't afford to pay for it. My guess is the cost of the Citrix Clients isn't nearly as bad as the cost of all of the copies of MS apps you sound like you want to run. Anyways, these are some pretty decent ways to get remote desktops. However, with Microsoft, you don't really get a break on the pricing that way, it does simplify administration of the desktop, and makes replacing broken hardware much easier.
Kirby
The guy asked a simple question: Is there anything like Citrix that runs on Linux and that is either free or cheap?
I'm not sure where in that question you get the need to know the information that the person requested. Now - if you were the consultant that was hired to handle the project, that would be a different story, but he just asked for advice.
Another user below mentioned LTSP for which more information can be found at the LTSP project's web site.
There is a K12 LTSP project as well here.
As for the KDE comment... I don't think he meant that -- on the surface -- it is ironic that the DOE was named KDE but rather that it is ironic because of the question that he is asking.
Works over a modem just fine, and windows clients, as well as unix ones (rdesktop).
You still have the cost issue though, because you still have to pay for a license for _Each concurrent client_ for _each piece of software_.
That is to say, if you want to let 10 people connect to a terminal server, you have to buy 10 client licenses (cheap), and (for instance) 10 copies of office (!!), 10 copies of adobe photoshop (!!) and so on.
If you want them to be able to access a single machine, and only one person per machine, install xp pro. It comes with this ability.
If do not want to pay for xp pro, then VNC is _the_ solution. Effectively gives you the same arrangement as xp pro, since only one vnc client can connect to any particular computer at a time (you are controlling the single mouse).
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I have a customer that has 10 simultaneous citrix ica connections over a 56k line. It works fine. Just use icon caching, 16-color(who needs 24-bit for word, access, most other business apps). Remote X is also very usable with blackbox, at 16 color over 128k link. I know it won't do wekk over 33.6, unless maybe with compression, never used it.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
http://www.paulandlesley.org/faqs/LBX-HOWTO.html
Here is an howto on a low bandwith proxy. it's included with x, no modules to add on, works over a phone line, and has a kitchen sink.
LBX (Low Bandwidth X) is an X server extension which performs compression on the X protocol. It is meant to be used in conjunction with X applications and an X server which are separated by a slow network connection, to improve display and response time
what os are the desktop systems running? if it's xp pro you can use remote desktop for free.
Tarantella isnt all that cheap, but if you dont need a lot of Enterprise management functionality, they offer a stripped down version called something like the Linux Starter Pak for under 50 concurrent users, that is signficantly cheaper.
And no, I dont work for them, but I did like their product on Solaris and their tech staff seems to be very unix-saavy, even though they support Windows too.
KDE won't know about a Linux box unless they actually query the server, which they won't do. VNC, on the other hand, can be blocked by the state-they block everything in and out except for about two ports. (slight exaggeration, but accurate.) Even if I did route VNC through another port, they would still be able to pick up the packets. The server is ideally a Linux box, but it can be shifted to Windows if need be. X11 and Remote Desktop's massive bandwidth requirements make it impossible unless VNC or another carrier were used, and be aware that not every high school student knows how to boot Linux and actually use it, so it will have to be easily script-able. The Tarantella link seemed promising, I'll check that out. Thanks for your flames and other replies.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Yes, they do give things out for nearly free to education (in comparison to the normal prices they gouge most people with.) But their enterprise solutions are NOT reasonable for small-middle sized educational establishments. However, there are linux based solutions for this already. If they were not adverse to using a more customizable, and more economically sound product you would easily have a solution.
As someone that uses citrix and tight vnc over a 33.6, I can tell you that there is no difference. I run 256 colors on both and they are both slower than a sunday sermon in july, but they let me get the job done.
I also run ssh and text/curses programs run just fine (btw, vnc is over ssh).
I have not tried straight X apps because I feel safer with a stateless connection over dialup(citrix has some problems with this btw).
One thing that you may want to think about, you have to manage ports and startup with vnc.
Why do you want to give them a remote desktop? All they need is access to their files, schoolwork, homework, notes from the teacher... This is nothing that can't be handled via a web interface. No need to install anything meets your "ease of use" criteria. A remote desktop of any kind will kill that, unless you plan on going to each house to install and set things up yourself.
Student's limited by a dialup will not be able to use a remote desktop and still be able to get things done before bedtime..
--- Keep the choice with the user..
I found that you can get pretty good performance if you tunnel X over a compressed ssh connection. Applications take a while to load, but they're pretty zippy once they've started.
...
From linux you can do:
ssh -C machine.domain
xterm &
I've used it often. It's useable on 28.8, a bit gross on 14.4. LBX gives much better results than X over a compressed SSH pipe.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...he want to use thin Linux desktops to run M$ software.
In which case he wants rdesktop. You can run it on thin boxes in about 16MB OK, more if you want to cache fonts and stuff, down to about 8 if you take the time to optimise the living daylights out of everything.
If the place is so pro Microsoft, (s)he should fetch a copy of the GNUwin2 ISO and install stuff from it everywhere he's allowed to. And tell the nice workers about it. When the next unheralded MS virus invasion happens, they'll still have tools they can use. When they want to do something like run text from frame to frame, they won't need to buy Publisher, just use OOo. When they want a graphics program, GIMP will do a lot of stuff without a $1500 outlay. And so on. After a while, they'll be sufficiently reliant on random FOSS tools for day-to-day work that to deny its integrity would be self-evidently foolish.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I used PC Anywhere (under windows 2000) for a few years, and it's a good product.
You can acces a remote PC, but also transfer files. It uses an efficient compression method, and can use encryption.
____
nico
Nico-Live
VNC is cheap. It works. It's easy.
It's also a network hog, even compared to X-11. KDE or Gnome running on X turn it into a hog, but if you're running a pure window manager instead of integrated behemoth, you'll find X is relatively low traffic and quite snappy.
Personally I find that VNC performs over a 10MBit ethernet runs about the same as an X-11 terminal at the end of a dialup line. (I use VNC for slaving Win boxen from my main Linux dev box, the X-11 access was to provide support for a customer over the past three years.)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I would look into NX from NoMachine. I don't know much about it, but it may be close to what you are looking for. It is apparently not free. I tried the demo a few days ago over a 33.6 kbps modem and I was impressed.
3 28.html
;-)
I found it because it came up on the new forum@XFree86.org -- here is the first post of that thread: http://xfree86.org/pipermail/forum/2003-March/000
And here are two excerpts:
<quote>
We spent last three years trying to make X so good as a network computing platform to compete in performances and functionalities with the leading proprietary technologies from Microsoft, Citrix and Tarantella. NX was made available few weeks ago. You can find all the modifications we did to the XFree86 code base as well all the additional components (for example the X compression libraries) at http://www.nomachine.com/dev_sources.php. Not only NX beats those products in performances, but aims to make X-Window the standard way to deploy applications to users of any OS.
</quote>
<quote>
- NX provides X, RDP and VNC desktops trasforming foreign protocols to X protocol.
- NX is a complete X distribution for MS Windows
- NX compresses X protocol (and foreign protocols) to a degree that makes possible to run complete desktop sessions on a remote server across the Internet, even through a modem link. A TestDrive server is available to the public. You can run a KDE or GNOME session from there, just to try.
- NX makes any Linux workstation a Terminal Server, in the MS sense.
- NX core software is based on XFree86, OpenSSH, RDesktop, VNC and other OpenSource components. All X related stuff developed by NoMachine has been released under GPL.
- NX higher level components are commercial software but any company or good developer could implement an OpenNX project in a few months, if not weeks.
We know we made a very good job and want to preserve a competitive advantage, but it's our interest to have competition. We want to push X and Linux as a network computing platform. If X wins, we win.
</quote>
The writer might have a bias.
Here's the home page: http://www.nomachine.com
In our school we simply use ssh (putty if the user is on windows), and tunnel whatever is needed over it.
You don't want to run plain X11 over dial-up--it wasn't designed for that. The X11 protocol was designed to be fast for local connections and fast networks. That's why X11 performs comparable to procedure-call APIs like those found in Windows for local graphics.
However, there are two X11-based protocols designed for dial-up: LBX and DXPC (check on Google). LBX most likely comes with your X server. Here's a simple example of how to use it:
display-machine$ ssh -X remotehost
remote$ lbxproxy&
remote$ DISPLAY=:63
remote$ xterm&
They are a little company with a product called 'Canaveral IQ' that is a direct competitor to Citrix. It's very powerfull, cheap, and claims to overcome the hellish prinint that plagues Citrix by using either PostScript or EMF (I can't remember which). My company just got a demo version, and it kicks ass. Windows only on the server side, it sits on top of a Windows Terminal Server, but the client is available for just about anything. Version 2.0 is due out in a couple of months, and it looks quite nice. Only thing that makes me nervous is that they are VERY Pro-Microsoft. The entire setup operates over RDP, which they have licensed from MS. If you contact them, expect some MS-Cheerleaders to answer the phone. Bias aside though, it is a phenomenal product.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy