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Proxy Servers Lighten Up X
An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com is reporting on a compression and differential proxy scheme for X that makes it practical to xhost rich applications like Mozilla or a whole UNIX desktop over a 9.6Kbps connection (think cell phone with GSM modem). The company developing NX has a neat test drive set up -- and it is way zippier than VNC. There'll be a paper about it at the next LinuxKongress in Saarbrucken, Germany, and a call is out to OSS programmers to build on the GPL'ed NX library."
Its surely not meant for that, think gsm -> bluetooth -> laptop This should be sweet
What would be cool also would be if you could use X over a single connection from your local machine to another, so you can use it from an rfc1918 address behind NAT to the "server", without having to set up tunnelling.
Citrix is pretty fast (I use the Linux Citrix client on an OpenBSD box to work on a machine halfway across the country) but it caches a huge amount of data locally. Of course that's the tradeoff for the speed you see. If speed isn't that big an issue stick to TightVNC, the price is right :)
Trolling is a art,
The mobile phone screen angle is a red herring. The really great thing about this is that it massively reduces the bandwidth required for running X over the network and it also reduces latency. The issue is that X consumes a lot of bandwidth. In some cases, if the bandwidth is available, X will use up to 10 Mbps to display a remote application screen. This is excessive and limits the use of X. Running X through ssh with compression enabled helps tremendously but can still consume 220Kbps. VNC offers similar 220Kbps or less performance to X through ssh but has much higher latencey so, it's not perfect either.
This new NX proxy is claiming 9.6Kbps X applications. Even if it doesn't come close to delivering that and is closer to 28Kbps or even 40Kbps it is still a massive improvement over X and ssh or even VNC and it now falls in line with the Citrix ICA protocol. It also apparently adds some of the Citrix features that X was missing but, the reduction in bandwidth alone is a tremendous improvement. You don't have to use it on a mobile phone and chances are I never will.
Yes it is. In fact, X is liked by so many because of its network transparency.
However, the amount of data that a typical "rich" X client sends (e.g., mozilla) is huge. Many X clients are not optimized in terms of the amount of display information they output (that is, they output a lot of stuff that could probably be optimized away). For many developers, this is within reason since they figure that most of the time the xserver and xclient will be on the same machine (e.g., running mozilla on my box to display on my monitor).
This handy piece of proxy software put out by NX claims to be able to cache a lot of the data that X clients send, thereby reducing the amount of data actually transmitted. This will allow "rich" applications which send a lot of data to be run over slower connections with an apparenet reduce in lag time.
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Basically, data over GSM is a bad idea. The max speed is 9600 kbit/s. There are other alternatives, such as HSCSD (High Speed Circuit Switched Data) which will provide 56.6kbit/s, and GPRS (General packet Radio Service) which will give up to 384kbit/s (if using EDGE). Then, we have the 3G standards, CDMA2000 and WCDMA, with up to 2Mbit/s (close to the base station, and only if you're almost alone in the cell...) While the 3G isn't much available, GPRS is. Why you'd like to use the GSM for data is beyond me.
Did I read this correctly? A project aiming to allow rich interfaces remotely is going to use a crippling web interface for administration? *boggle* I hope by "including" they mean "it'll be there, but you don't have to use it and we'll have something a tad more functional".
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
Now that's quite cool - a step towards being able to implement (in open source) equivalent functionality to Sun's Hot Desking .
There is a reason they didn't include it.. it was NOT NEEDED for what they were doing. They needed platform independent remote view/control. Nothing more, nothing less.
*ALL* modern operating systems have native file transfer mechanisms.. there is no need to bloat out something like VNC by re-inventing the wheel and shoving it in there..
Integrated encryption.. would be useful, unfortunately.. ( shouldn't even need to be a consideration, but in today's sick world it is. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----