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Google Releases Open Source NX Server
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.'"
Poor NoMachine... now they don't have a product
It's mentioned in the article. It says that Google rejected it because it's a mess of Bash, Expect, and C and very hard to maintain. Their implementation is mostly Python, with a little C and Bash.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
As a longtime NX user, this will be very well received. I feel like I'm one of a couple dozen NX users, however, meaning that I think this will go largely unnoticed by mainstream users. The non-proprietary NX-server packages are very non-trivial to install and all attempts thus far at a completed server setup have remained inadequate and completely fly-by-night/unmaintained. I hope people start to use this more and thus perhaps even push the technology farther.
put the what in the where?
It might be worth mentioning to some people who are no doubt confused; there is a difference between FreeNX and NX Free. And on a futher side note, I have tried installing FreeNX two or three times and the packages seemed to be unavailable from distro repo or even from the berlios FS (Weird!). In any case if this Google NX server isn't a piece of junk I will be over the moon!
In my opinion NX is #1 remote display (also sound and printing) technology there is. You get a great quality image over a very slow DSL connection! VNC doesn't come anywhere near it - and for the $0 price tag you can't beat it!
The trouble with NX Free is that it can only allow a few simultaneous connections at a time - I'm hoping Google's server changes this.
They are not reimplementing it, they are providing a wrapper to the X11 protocol so it performs better on low bandwidth, high latency links.
Ever tried do to remote X over, say, a 2Mb/s connection? Try it again with FreeNX and notice the large improvement in display performance.
Now if only they would somehow include GL in remote X.
I'd say that, these days, it is more about session persistence, network location, and access to local and/or network resources that make these technologies most useful.
VNC/RDP, for instance, make it really easy to have your entire desktop session, with all open programs, program state, etc. on one computer available over the network from another computer. If you have a whole bunch of windows open, with lots of tabs, and a half finished document, and some other stuff you are referring to, it is way more convenient to just connect to your session, rather than try to recreate it on another machine.
Citrix, X, and NX are really convenient for situations where a program's context matters. If I just want to type out a shopping list, or check a web page, it doesn't really matter where the program I use runs(which usually means that I should run it locally, because latency sucks). If, though, I'm opening my bittorrent client, or trying to edit some documents at work, it matters where the program is running. I want my bittorrent client to be running on a computer with a fast pipe and a big disk, even if I'm controlling it from my cellphone. If I'm trying to edit some work documents, I want Word running on my work's LAN, so all my documents on the fileserver will be available(without the risks involved in just copying stuff to my laptop, then leaving it on the train).
I worked at a school where the latter use was common and fairly highly valued. We didn't want to deal with the hassle of hundreds or thousands of potentially infected machines belonging to students and faculty having VPN access to the LAN. We did want students and faculty to be able to access their documents and email when they were at home. To solve the problem, we used Citrix to offer remote access to all the common programs that students and staff would use to view or edit documents, set up so that the programs would have access to the files of the user that logged in.
It wasn't perfect; but it largely worked. The user would go to a web portal, enter their credentials, and get a bunch of clickable icons. Click on "Word" or whatever and it would(after a few moments of Citrix doing its thing) pop up, looking modestly like a local application. If you hit "Open", though, you'd have access to all your documents from our fileserver. Super easy.
Couldn't they just google it?
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
This is excellent news, I've really enjoyed using NX but always found it slightly temperamental to use. Still, it gave me high performance rootless application access over a dodgy wifi link in Germany, back to my machine at uni in the UK - with the ability to resume every time the wifi dropped. I've known people have trouble resuming dropped sessions, though it worked when I needed it. Anything which is well-supported and makes NX nicer to work with is very welcome - I hope Google press on with making this better and better. It's be real nice if they'd make an open source client available too, preferably with a choice of front-end widget libraries ;-)
Another project, which I actually head about on Slashdot and am very impressed by is Xpra: http://partiwm.org/wiki/xpra
Xpra = X Persistent Remote Applications, i.e. connect to your xpra server (tunnels through ssh by default) to get rootless applications delivered to your desktop, disconnect and reconnect somewhere else and get the same apps back. Like screen, for X. It's not meant for fast-changing displays, e.g. video. But it's a nice, compact approach that largely consists of a few thousand lines of Python. It uses modern X extensions cunningly to get the job done without having to understand most of the X protocol itself. And, somewhat like NX, it's better suited to high latency links than simple X11 protocol is. These days I think Xpra is starting to get more advanced features such as Windows client support, theme matching for remote and local apps, some clipboard sharing, etc. It's a nice little app that has its uses, particularly if you want something simpler than NX to set up and administer. The server can also be easily run by an unprivileged user whereas I'm not sure if that's the case for NX (?).
A link to the announcement from Google.
You sir, are every IT departments nightmare.
- sarcasm is just one more service we offer -
Because NX on modern hardware can provide a user experience that is virtually indistinguishable from a local desktop.
Even X or VNC on a fast connection with fast machines on both ends will feel a bit sluggish. NX works great on old hardware with slow connections -- if you've got multiple clients, you can squeeze more clients out of the same hardware/bandwidth. This can be a *huge* deal.
NoMachine's products aren't cheap, but can be totally worth it given the cost savings in hardware, bandwidth, and support. Their free version also works great for anything but a terminal server.
You can chalk me up as a *huge* fan of NX.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose