NX - A Revolution In Network Computing?

Anonymous Coward writes "Judging from this interview, it looks like KDE developers have found a new toy to add to their desktop's networking capabilities. They claim to be able to cram a fullscreen KDE session -- KMail for mailing, Konqueror for file management, Mozilla for web browsing and OpenOffice for word processing -- into a 40 KBit/sec modem connection without losing responsiveness for the user experience. At aKademy, the 9 day KDE Community World Summit, a group of core developers started to work on NX/FreeNX integration to help facilitate the "re-invention of the KDE desktop environment" for KDE4. Knoppix-3.6 is the first Linux distribution to ship an integrated FreeNX server (created by Fabian Franz) with the NoMachine NX Client."

Comments

Educate me.

[Limburgher]

Is this on top of a remote X display, or in place of one?

How possible

[elgatozorbas]

How can you transfer a browser's contents over a 40kB line when its own internet connection can be a lot higher?
Z

I don't believe

[Snaapy]

into a 40 KBit/sec modem connection without losing responsiveness for the user experience.

I'd like to see any responsive image data over 40 Kbit line. Let's imagine some icon takes 64x64 pixels and is crunched to 4KB compressed. It still takes 0,5 seconds per an icon to load. Opening a start menu, waiting... please be patient.

Anyone who have surfed on a modem knows it's far from real-time responsiveness.

Microsoft had this for years :-)

[melted]

You can do RDP over analog modem and things are pretty darn snappy. And you could do this since Windows NT4 Terminal Server edition. Remote desktop comes stock with NT OSs since Windows 2000.

Re:So...

[Doctor Crumb]

PCAnywhere for linux is called X11. It's been around for years and years, this is just KDE taking advantage of a protocol to speed that up.

If this works...

[HangingChad]

...it's a Windows killer. I know, I know people have been saying that for years. But look, at the pace of development and innovation in Linux v Windows. Okay, maybe a killer, but it will most definitely be a nudge toward nitch market status for Windows.

Now that Shorthorn is starting to look like XP Rebloated, 5% of companies are contemplating a complete switch to Linux and 36% are considering some type of OSS introduction, this could push quite a few more over the edge.

Great idea.

Adding to my own post:Replacing Thin Clients

[Bravo_Two_Zero]

I should clarify. I have seen this:

RDP and RFB Foreign Protocols

NX accessibility and remote computing capabilities are not limited to Linux desktops and servers. NX encapsulates and translates into X protocol the Remote Desktop Protocol used by Microsoft Windows NT/2000 Terminal Server Edition and Citrix Metaframe, and Remote Frame Buffer, the protocol used by VNC, another Open Source remote computing facility, available numerous different operating systems.

Although NX compression offers the best performances when running native X applications, RDP and RFB sessions can be compressed by a factor ranging from 2 to 10. NX support of foreign protocols provides further advantages. Firstly, it extends its reach to virtually any computer and secondly, NX offers to the user a unified view of any application resource available over the Internet. ...so I might be a total darsh. But I still haven't been able to find an answer on the nomachine.com site as to whether that means it works with RDP clients (I think likely not), or that it serves RDP sessions via the X protocol (yeah, that's my guess).

Belongs in SSH

[Effugas]

NX really needs to be ported to into OpenSSH as an optional compression module for its X Forwarding component. That way, there's literally nothing more than:

ssh -X user@host ...and if both client and server support NX, things just fly.

--Dan

Re:How does it work?

[xybe]

From their site: NoMachine has developed exclusive X protocol compression techniques and an integrated set of proxy agents that make it possible to run complete remote desktop sessions, even at full screen, using narrowband Internet connections, at speeds as low as those offered by a 9600 band modem.

They use X at the base and add further compression and network optimization. In fact they make it work on top of VNC and RDP

Not too shabby

Re:Kan we say marKeting?

[Eloquence]

Early this year, c't magazine, probably the most respected German computer magazine, published a quite interesting comparison of office suites. They subjected all of them to a test with very large documents with 140 pages of text, 120 graphics and 240 footnotes. MS Word apparently became less and less reliable as more pictures were added - suddenly they could no longer be moved and aligned properly without destroying existing layout. The tester gave up on Word but managed to do it with most of the other suites (including OO). They also found OO to be on the same level as MSO in terms of functionality.

Now, many bad experiences people may have with OO are probably related to importing existing MS documents. Even though the filters are pretty good, they are obviously not perfect, and last I checked macros were ignored entirely. However, that is not a fair comparison -- Microsoft would utterly fail it, as they don't have the most basic OO import filter. And the complexity of this problem is similarly high as the one of emulating the Windows API on Linux - you don't just have to get the file format right, you also have to duplicate Microsoft's way of interpreting it, even if it's buggy and/or inconsistent.

Nevertheless, the developers are always working hard on improving import filters, as it is obviously essential to business migration. OpenOffice 2.0 will have improved filters, and it will also have much better database management with support for databases directly stored in files (as Access does).

OpenOffice is clearly more performance-hungry than MS Office, although in my experience that is mostly the start-up time. I don't anticipate major improvements in this area. If you're looking for a very slim MS Word replacement, KWord or AbiWord are probably projects worth keeping an eye on. TextMaker, a proprietary package, also exists for Linux. And if you're into DTP, Scribus is quite mature already.

NX works now

[rRaminrodt]

NX works now, with the existing X11 apps you already have. That doesn't just include KDE and GNOME, that includes xclock and emacs and acrobat and so on... that includes those oddball legacy X11 programs that you can't reasonably rebuild to support new libraries. I think that's a pretty valuable ability.

Re:No, wrong idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we please let go of the dream of using X, NX, VNC or anything else over dial-up or slow links? It's not happening people.

Shutup, you wiseacre of a Don Quichotte! Shutup at least until you have testdriven NX.

I've used X and VNC over 100Mbit LAN and 802.11b. It's useable but frustratingly slow.

OK -- at least here you are right. Continue with that part.

To give you an answer to your real question::

• it is so slow because of the excessive roundtrips modern toolkits and GUIs load upon the marvellous X11-protocol
• NX is so fast because it gets rid of these roundtrips altogether

Now go do your homework. Testdrive NX and then come back to report.

Re:Teacher (aka non-commercial Tutor) here.

[misleb]

X was doing it years before Microsoft in a much more modular and flexible way. KDE/NX is improving on that, not imitating Microsoft. Terminal services require you to pull a full desktop from a remote server. X allows one to pull individual single applications that display as if it were running local. WAAAAYYYY better than Terminal Server IMNSO.

Rebuttal. Why is that modded up?

[zealotasd]

>>NX takes the X protocol and uses various caching and compression methods to make it more efficient.

I've never read so much arrogance in my life. SlashdotTroll wasn't trolling. You described what SlashdotTroll summarily protested the purpose of the NX server.

And apparently because SlashdotTroll is throwing around a different dialect of English with *many* keyboarding errors, she/he rebutted your argument under an anonymous post because obviously enough people have modded down the post because the word "Troll" appears in the userID.

If SlashdotTroll is a troll, then how did you get so on-topic as did the post you replied to and yet you or someone weilded moderator negation with no more merit than declaring "I'm pretty sure the parent is BS or I just can't read what its saying."

There was a similar story about a Man whom people declared as being the Son of God, and that said man, spoke somthing along the lines of;

(Acts 9:16);
"For I will shew him how great things he must suffer for my name's sake."