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."

Comments

What do these things do?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:What do these things do?

[Leomania]

From the manpage for screen:

"Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a
physical terminal between several processes (typically
interactive shells)."

I use it all the time; start an interactive job while I'm at work on a particular machine using screen, disconnect using "CTRL-A d" then go home, log into the same machine, issue the command "screen -r" and I'm right back into that shell session.

These days, I mostly use TightVNC over a VPN pipe instead, which gives me the graphical equivalent of this.

Hope this helps.

- Leo

Re:What do these things do?

[KilobyteKnight]

So, you're saying that you should be able to get a full and complete understanding of a technical system solution from a Slashdot article blurb without doing any research of your own or without reading any of the links?

I believe what what the poster meant was that a news posting should at least have a basic overview of what the heck it's about.

I know what Knoppix is, I know what screen is, but I don't have a clue what NX is. Even descriptive adjectives would help.

I'm interested in finding out what NX is. Since the link is Sashdotted I can't at the moment. I've gotten side tracked by your anonymous flame. I will probably have forgotten about it by later today. So I'm left wondering.

The editors here signed million dollar contracts, revenue is coming in from ads and subscriptions, they've been at it for years.... you'd think they'd have learned at least a few basic journalism techniques.

I see a lot of wrong information posted as news. The most descriptive news items are typically when they lucked out and copied a good paragraph from the story link. Heck, they aren't even good at checking to see if they've already posted the story on their own site.

It's just laziness. I'd expect such from volunteers... but as I pointed out, they're getting paid well.

Re:What do these things do?

[KilobyteKnight]

Nothings changed since they started making money.

Oh, but it has. It changed from being a hobby to being a business. A business based in part on ad revenue. And I, as a consumer, for whom those ads are targetted, certainly have every right to comment on the quality of the service.

One thing that has remained pretty much the same is the quality of the service. I expect more from professionals than I do from hobbyists. And don't kid yourself into thinking they haven't entered the realm of paid professionals.

Don't get me wrong, the Slashdot crew broke ground. I respect them for that. They were among the first to do what they do. They created something wonderful. Then they got paid and have done little more than add a couple of features to the website since then. Moderating and meta-moderating and karma may help weed some of the nonsense out of the user responses, but unless they pay attention to people like me the nonsense will continue in the articles themselves.

I intend this as constructive criticism, not a troll or a flame. I want Slashdot to stay around. I just want it to be better.

Slashdot shouldn't rest on its laurels.

Poor NoMachine indeed.

[FreeLinux]

(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.

Better than VNC through compressed ssh?

[jbwiv]

I've always made out quite well with running a VNC connection through a compressed ssh pipe, like so:

$ ssh -f -CNL5901:localhost:5901 mylogin@myremotemachine

$ vncviewer localhost:1

How's NX any different/better? When it first came out, I gave it a look but didn't think speed was overly impressive...

Re:Better than VNC through compressed ssh?

[hackel]

As the original post said, you can reconnect to disconnected sessions, which is nice. A VNC can't do that if the SSH tunnel is broken. I also currently launch VNC from inetd, and once that connection's broken, there's no way to re-connect to it. I'm definitely looking forward to checking out FreeNX!

Re:VNC

[jrcamp]

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.

You are wrong

[RenatoRam]

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...

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[agoliveira]

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.

what NX is

[CoJoNEs]

This was linked from NoMachine's site, somehow I got to it before it died.
http://www.newsforge.com/software/03/07/10/2146247 .shtml?tid=11
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.

Re:TightVNC is great

[cduffy]

TightVNC is still horrifically slow (and somewhat bandwidth-consumptive) compared to RDP -- try them side-by-side some time.