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Splashtop's Cliff Miller Talks About Their New Linux App (Video)
Yes, you can now have full remote access to your home computer or a server at work that's running Ubuntu Linux. Really any Linux distro, although only Ubuntu is formally supported by Splashtop. What? You say you already control your home and work Linux computers from your Android tablet with VNC? That there's a whole bunch of Android VNC apps out there already? And plenty for iOS, too? You're right. But Cliff says Splashtop is better than the others. It can play video at a full 30 frames per second, and has low enough latency (depending on your connection) that you can play video games remotely in between taking care of that list of server issues your boss emailed to you. Or perhaps, in between work tasks, you take a dip in the ocean, because you're working from the beach, not from a stuffy office. It seems that work and living locations get a little more remote from each other every year, and Splashtop is helping to make that happen. This video interview is, itself, an example of how our world has gotten flatter; Cliff was in China and I was in Florida. The connection wasn't perfect, but the fact that we could have this conversation at all is a wonder. Please note, too, that while Cliff Miller is now Chief Marketing Officer for Splashtop, he was also the founder and first CEO of TurboLinux, so he is not new to Linux. And Splashtop is the company that supplied the "instant on" Linux OS a lot of computer manufacturers bundled with their Windows computers for a few years. Now, of course, they're focusing on the remote desktop, and seem to be making a go of it despite heavy competition in that market niche.
So far I'm not a fan of Version 2. They've detached themselves from Google servers and I know why they did it. Google just released Chrome Remote Desktop, which is a VERY fine replacement for TeamViewer-type implementations. Surely Google will add this to Android's Chrome stack and then it's truly game on for all of these me-too NAT-traversing, competing remote desktop applications. Interesting times ahead in this space.
put the what in the where?
The session drops & you loose all apps that were running on the X Desktop... Which is a the reason I used Xvnc when I had a need to do this. Xvnc is headless (a virtual X desktop) that you use VNC to connect to. Xvnc's biggest weakness was VNC -- slooowwww but it worked way back when there was no other means of doing this.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
ITurboLinux was sold to some chinese firm, who used the name and then dumped it.
Actually, it was a Japanese company, Living on the Edge, soon renamed to Livedoor. Soon afterwards, the CEO of Livedoor went to prison for securities fraud.
No. That simply forwards X11, and compresses the data stream. NX does a whole lot more - it implements an X server on the client, and an X client on the server, and re-implements the protocol in a manner that involves fewer round trips.
Suppose you trigger an X11 call to move a window or something, and it requires two round trips and sends 10 bytes of data. If you simply compress that you might get it down to a few bytes, but that isn't doing much since bandwidth wasn't your problem. You still have to wait for 4x the link latency for the operation to complete.
All of these solutions try to cut down on the latency problem by running a fake server/client close to the real client/server. Each of these sees a low-latency connection and goes at full speed, and then the software tries to keep the screen as up-to-date as it can within the real-world constraints.
I can't speak for how this solution compares to the various other ones. I can vouch for the fact that getting it to run will be a PITA since they don't seem to distribute source, and I don't run their one chosen distro.