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?"

Comments

VNC is not out of the question.

[jensend]

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.

Re:VNC is not out of the question.

[jensend]

Once again- are you reducing color depth? Using 8-bit color depth may be ugly, but it should more than sufficient for controlling the machine (unless you're trying to do graphics-intensive apps remotely)- and it reduces the amount of data which has to be transferred significantly.

Re:VNC is not out of the question.

[PurpleFloyd]

Other people have mentioned color depth, but there are a few other things you might want to look into:

• Does the network have the capacity in the first place? I've run VNC over 10Mbit switched Ethernet without much slowdown; but if the network is non-switched or just really busy, anything that requires low latency is going to be hosed.
• Get rid of unnecessary pixmaps. On WinVNC, there's an option to remove the wallpaper (that can REALLY help); in X use a windowmanager or theme that relies on simple shapes and solid colors rather than pixmaps and gradients.
• Try using vanilla VNC. If the computers on each end aren't fairly speedy, the compression may actually slow things down over a LAN.

CrossOver OfficeServer Edition

[Peartree]

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 :)

Tarantella

[humanasset]

Check out Tarantella . Similar to Citrix MetaFrame, but less expensive, and runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX.

Re:X11

[W. Justice Black]

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.

VERY wrong about that. ICA as a protocol is thin enough that you can run a session over as little as a 14.4k modem connection (I've done it) and have most apps usable, and things get almost spritely on 56k. It's VERY good at caching, optimizing, and generally being quick over low-bandwidth links. TightVNC is better than VNC over narrow links, but nobody compares to ICA afaik. I haven't tried Tarantella. Maybe someone could comment?

Re:Uhhh....

[Bishop]

You can run X over 14.4k useing an X11 protocol compressor such as LBX or DXPC. It was fast enough to work with, but not something you would want to do everyday. Having used Citrix and PCAnywhere over a ~33.6K modem I can assure you that neither are particularly faster then compressed X.

Reading between the lines...

[leonbrooks]

...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.

Re:Maybe, LTSP?

[melonman]

LTSP is great, but I don't think it will do the 56k modem thing. It's basically X11 and a few other standard Linux services linked together in a rather clever way, so the client-server networks overheads are the same as for X11, plus running XFS over tcp, plus serving files... with ten machines, a 10mbit network boils, our current 100mbit one gets congested on occasions, and I'm thinking of getting a gigabyte backbone from the hub to the server in the near future.

What you can do is run rdesktop, mentioned below, from an LTSP terminal. So if your terminals are in the same place, you could have a local network with a modest Linux server running the diskless terminals, and those terminals connecting to W2K using rdekstop and Terminal Server. You still need TS licences, but they are a lot cheaper than Citrix licences, especially for education. I've tried it briefly, and it worked very well: just waiting for the other half of my Windows server to turn up in the post to try it for real...