Slashdot Mirror
Next Knoppix Release to Feature GPL'd FreeNX
linuxtag-reporter writes "The first day of LinuxTag, Europe's biggest Free Software event (expecting 25,000 visitors) already has one big highlight. It seems that Fabian Franz from the Knoppix Project hacked up a 'FreeNX Server' based on NoMachine's NX technology (poor NoMachine might lose business now). Fabian Franz presented a first preview of the 'GPL Edition' in a live demo together with Kurt Pfeifle. The demo showed sessions going from Germany to Italy just based on a slow WLAN connectivity (shared with hundreds of visitors). A connection lost due to bad network conditions was easily re-connected to, and a deliberately suspended session was revitalized too -- it was just like 'screen' with a GUI! A report on the official LinuxTag webpage says FreeNX will be publically released for the first time as part of the upcoming Knoppix-3.6 release. The Kalyxo project is building and hosting Debian packages of FreeNX and NX/GPL for everyone to use."
Besides being part of a future Knoppix release, what is NX?
Please assume that some readers (me, others?) don't know what "screen" is.
Maybe I should google for "linux screen knoppix" - that would be useful...
I could click on the nomachine.com link, but why should I have to?
-ac
(poor NoMachine might lose business now).
This is compounded by higher bandwidth charges due to their present Slashdotting. They'll be tits up in no time.
It seems that Knoppix doesn't stop surprising everyone, being probably the most innovative Linux distro (introduced LiveCD and great hardware detection).
It would be great if other distro's developers tried going the same way - be innovative, be creative!. Now it's quite boring to have hundred of Kno* and *pix distros, every one built with philosophy "take Knoppix and replace two apps with your favourite ones".
Is there any way to financially support Knoppix?
How's NX any different/better? When it first came out, I gave it a look but didn't think speed was overly impressive...
VNC performance has always been unacceptable to me, even on LAN's. NX uses the X11 protocol, but it encrypts (via SSH) and compresses by itself so you don't have to open an SSH tunnel, etc. It can also play the sound on the local host.
It's a real easy way to get debian installed on your hard drive.
Boot up, hit Ctrl-Alt-F2, type knx-hdinstall.
Silpon Designs
Scented Paper Products
Heh, you obviously don't understand the point of Free software. In general, having that product available as Free software will attract much more users than the few at that particular company that might go out of business. If they are -smart-, they will assist the open source development effort, and re-tailor their business to provide expert integration solutions of FreeNX, etc.
It's all about -service- and developing code, not re-selling code over and over again without doing any work. That's the difference. They don't have to go out of business, just change their old business model.
NoMachine had opensourced the NX products, so anybody has the legal right of forking and renaming it.
Nothing particularly new: firms will continue to give money to NoMachine for support and administration tools.
Have fun...
Ciao, Renato
Actually, you are wrong indeed.
All the core NX technology is GPL. The proprietary part is based on them. What Fabian did was to take those components and create it's own version of this part.
Scientia est Potentia
But an F/OSS hacker has taken a company's proprietary work and made it available for free, even giving it a similar name.
Why is this a good thing?
Have they taken (ie stolen) the company's work? Or did they simply re-implement a commercial product's functionality from scratch? In the latter case I don't believe there is anything wrong with that (and seemingly neither do you, since you seem to be in support of Linux). In fact I consider that to be a very good thing. Complaining about that is like complaining that couples getting married and having sex out of love is hurting prostitution.
Finkployd
NX is a PUBLIC standard, they WANT other implementations of it. Nothing becomes real mainstream if it's closed, look at HTTP/FTP/SMTP/VNC those are all standards. Then you have closed things, like IM where there are a million different closed protocols (and yes a few open ones).
Knoppix is implementing a protocol that NX released, they also released a proprietary implementation of it. Obviously they want people to buy theirs, but they published the protocol so that others could use it to. (In turn making their protocol stronger, and their product stronger)
In my case Knoppix-STD has been awesome! It's allowed me to play with wireless security tools that I had previously had a bitch of a time trying to configure in a standard Linux Distro. No driver fiddling, no recompiling, no patches, no hair pulling! i fire up Knoppix-STD, plug ni my Lucent card, run an applet to configure my wireless, and away I go with Kismet, Airsnort, Wallenreiter (sp?), Airtraf, and other tools like Ethereal. Knoppix has allowed me, a Windows user, to experience and get accustomed to Linux without having to worry about hosing a drive or sweating arcane drivers issues. If I screw something up or get lost I can simply reboot and be back to square one with no damage done. as soon as I figure out how to mount a USB FOB and install my own apps on it etc. I'll be well on my way to moving a Linux partition onto my HD full time :-)
:-)
IMO, Knoppix provides a terrific way to introduce people to Linux. You can also use it to (more) securely surf on strange computers if you want. I see someone has linked to soemthing called Gnoppix below this - I'll be checking that out next! Live Distros rock!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Nothing becomes real mainstream if it's closed
Yeah, that Windows product will never catch on!
Sorry. I had to. I couldn't help it. The voices told me to.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The biggest benefit is that you can hand a disk to someone and say, "Here, try Linux." They don't have install 'er nothin', just boot from it.
The next biggest would be that it's an ultra-super rescue disk.
And bit less important, to me at least, but still a virtue, is that you can pop it into any machine, say a friends, one at work, or a clients and run in your prefered enviroment.
KFG
Newsforge article
Potential source for FreeNX Server
emacs can do that! what other apps do you need anyway?
This was linked from NoMachine's site, somehow I got to it before it died.7 .shtml?tid=11
http://www.newsforge.com/software/03/07/10/214624
from the article:
Thin client computing lets users run applications on a remote server and display the results locally. NX Client works something like VNC (see our recent story), but instead of using Remote Frame Buffer protocol, NX Client acts as an X Window server. Thin clients help contain costs by eliminating the need to install applications at each user's desktop, and improve security by limiting the availability of applications and data. The clients themselves can be dedicated hardware devices or regular computers running thin client software.
NX is about networking - high latency/long distance(many hops) - are enough to run X applications.
....
Printing support. Connect to remote NX server - and print on your local printer.
Multimedia support - launch xmms remotely and hear the sound in your headphones
knoppix is _great_ as a recovery / analysis tool. For instance, I'm installing XP on some machine and can't figure out what kind of ethernet card it has... Linux has 'lspci', but XP just reports "Unknown network card."
I can boot into Knoppix, lspci, download the drivers I need from Intel's site, and put them on the disk for Windows to find.
Another good example is my boss, who's laptop drive crashed a few weeks ago. While he waited for a replacement, he ran everything off of Knoppix and a USB Key.
It's impressive stuff.
--
lds
Introduction to NX technology
NX uses CUPS for printing support so you can print from remote servers to your local printers using the IPP 1.1 protocol. It's possible also to use my local printers exported by SAMBA which is quite useful ...
TightVNC is still horrifically slow (and somewhat bandwidth-consumptive) compared to RDP -- try them side-by-side some time.
There was nice article about the NX:
http://www.orangecrate.com/article.php?sid=677
But an F/OSS hacker has taken a company's proprietary work
... Why is this a good thing?
If I understand correctly, (s)he only took their Free work. The core of the NoMachine product is GPL.
and made it available for free
Speaking strictly from a capitalist standpoint, it is good because it reduces the cost to businesses that wish to use this technology. Similarly, the freeness of HTTP software (client and server) has been a great boon to corporations that wish to provide easy access to information about their product lines. This has in turn lead to consumers making more informed decisions, which is one of the keystones of free market capitalism. (that's just the good part, in response to your question, see below for a look at the bad part)
even giving it a similar name.
The similarity in the name is the "NX" part. I believe NX is a Free protocol. This is much like referring to both Sendmail and Postfix as SMTP engines.
If F/OSS developers want to speed up Linux, the corporate environment is where they should be looking. By doing this they have enabled corporations to get something for free
Very well said. This statemtnt (which clearly supports FLOSS) seems to be in contrast to the rest of your post.
which could cause a company (and a lot of potential Linux users) to go out of business.
All competition has this effect, whether from proprietary or Free sources. Are Chevrolet and Ford evil because they caused Yugo to go out of business?
How are the developers supposed to feed their children if they're unemployed?
They can't. But this makes a leap from "FreeNX removed or reduced the ability to charge twice for solving a problem once" to "developers will be unemployed." That is a spurious leap. The ideal situation, from an economic standpoint, would be for each solution to each problem to be developed once, and the development effort compensated once, freeing the development resource to move on to the next problem. The increased pool of available software labour resources would reduce the time delay businesses incur in solving their information problems, but does not necessarily reduce the time value of solving any given problem the first time. If we begin to approach software development as a temporally-oriented problem solving service, one cannot accurately predict the effect on the wages paid - the economic shift is too great to predict the result on the supply side - but the demand side will be very happy indeed.
We have not yet developed the economic models to make this a practical reality yet, but with FLOSS operating in tension with proprietary software, the economic stage has been set. This is the typical first stage in every major economic advancement - new technology, in this case zero cost reproduction of information, makes new economic models possible. The shift to the implementation of those new economic models must necessarily occur after the technological advancement, and so a period of market inefficiency occurs. It's not a bad thing, any more than Ford's assembly line was bad for Daimler Benz.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
It is a great simple way to let management play with Linux too. Where in the management world of MSOutlook and MSProject they can't load Linux on their box, but they can give Knoppix a whirl on *their* box and play with it on their own. Then when you want to use Linux for your next project they are more likely to let you because it is something they have used and doesn't seem so foreign.
It might surprise you the number of people who want to play around with Linux, but just haven't yet. I put up a small note that I was giving away Knoppix disks for free at work. I have given away (averaging two) a day for the last month. Try it at your work and see what happens. You might be surprised at whom is interested in playing with Linux.
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
It's not obvious from what I've been able to connect to so far that isn't slashdotted as to whether you can connect to a Windows box from a Linux box (the orangecrate.com article linked further down shows a connection going from a windows box to a linux box)
That's actually 2 questions, though - "Does the technology support it" AND "does the LICENSE allow it?"
I'm assuming that the technical capability is there (just as it is in VNC)...
Last time I saw the EULA for a recent Windows version I saw in infamous "you may not connect with 3rd-party tools" clause in the license. Is that still there? Is using FreeNX (or VNC or anything else) to connect to a windows box remotely still a violation of the license?
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I wonder how this affects the proposed KDE/NX integration supposedly under development by Aaron Seigo? If you'll remember, this was mentioned way back in December in response to UserLinux shipping Gnome, but I haven't heard anything about it since... let's hope this FreeNX is desktop-independent.
For those still mystified as to what NX is, it is essentially X11 tunneled through SSH, with some clever caching to drastically limit the number of connections an X server/client need to make, to make the connection feel much quicker.
untechnical explanation: Normally a remote X session will have to make many hundreds/thousands of trips between the server and client, but NX uses a cache at both ends, only making the most necessary trips, and usually just sending a diff of the changes rather than the whole stream of data. (roughly speaking, of course, as I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about.)