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Google Releases Open Source NX Server

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the free-and-good-together-defies-reason dept.

wisesifu writes with news of a new open source NX server, dubbed NeatX, that was released by Google and promptly lost in the shuffle of the Chrome OS announcement. "NX technology was developed by NoMachine to handle remote X Window connections and make a graphical desktop display usable over the Internet. By its own admission, Google has been looking at remote desktop technologies for 'quite a while' and decided to develop Neatx as existing NX server products are either proprietary or difficult to maintain. 'The good old X Window system can be used over the network, but it has issues with network latency and bandwidth. Neatx remedies some of these issues,' Google engineers wrote on the company's open source blog. NoMachine had released parts of the source code to its NX product under the GPL, but the NX server remained proprietary. [...] Neatx is written in Python, with a few wrapper scripts in Bash and one program written in C 'for performance reasons.'"

3 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. NIH by FrankSchwab · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From TFA:
    "There is a free implementation of an NX server based on NoMachine's libraries named FreeNX, but this did not appeal to Google.

    "FreeNX's primary target is to replace the one closed component and is written in a mix of several thousand lines of Bash, Expect and C, making FreeNX difficult to maintain," according to Google.

    Neatx is written in Python, with a few wrapper scripts in Bash and one program written in C "for performance reasons". "

    It was unmaintainable because it was written in Bash, Expect, and C, so they rewrote it in Bash, Python, and C?

    --
    And the worms ate into his brain.
  2. Re:Sucks to be NoMachine by GreenPickles · · Score: 5, Insightful

    FreeNX has been around for quite some time and that hasn't killed NoMachine off. However, Google being involved may create more OpenSource developer interest in NX and perhaps someone will create a good Windows NX Server, Windows NX Client and better management tools. If Google rallies that much developer support it could mean an end to NoMachine.

  3. Re:Still requires creation of user "nx"? Noooooo! by the_weasel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You sir, are every IT departments nightmare.

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    - sarcasm is just one more service we offer -