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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.
Right, for some reason the "Disable ads" checkbox is not hiding all ads.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
I'm just now getting around to exploring remote admin options. I just recently discovered the joy of X over SSH and decided to be done with VNC. Now I see this...why would I use Splashtop instead of X over SSH?
Not a challenge, a request for info.
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?
Splashtop shipped an unencrypted remote access solution for nearly 1.5 years without giant disclaimers.
http://slickdeals.net/forums/archive/index.php/t-4033850.html
I'm supposed to trust them now that it's finally encrypted?
Yeeehaaaaaw !! Linux is making some sort of a showing - in a race run 20 years ago !!
no not quite linux has been able to do this for years already with several different protocals. its more like:
Yeeehaaaaaw !! We wrote our app that for Linux to do something that you could already do on linux for years and pretending that this is wonderful and new so you will buy our proprietary version that will spam you with adds while you work and we promise not to spy on what your doing really!!
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
This is only for locating your computers remotely outside of your network.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
Well, yes, I assumed that...that's the only way I'd want to generally be using this...?
Just watched the video...looks like they charge you by the minute for this too?
No thanks...more secure and free methods out there is seems...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
I love using stuff like VNC and having a 15 second lag between my mouse or keyboard click and the screen refresh even on a Gigabit network connection running on an 8 core "thin" client. I mean its been a very long time since I could type faster then the screen can refresh. Its awesome the amount of CPU performance and network speed you need to make your workstation feel like its 1989 all over again.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
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.
Seriously, using Xvnc to forward your ssh session just to deal with disconnections? That is so backwards.
xpra is way better than this, and even NX, despite being old and closed/abandoned is still better than this, and both are seamless.
I haven't tried splashtop, and it being closed source I doubt I will in a hurry, but I reckon xpra is probably on par with it when it comes to performance - we also use x264 encoding where appropriate - and this is the keyword: where appropriate (like video, fast moving animations, etc), in many other cases it's not..
TODO: 753) write sig.
xpra does this on Linux, Windows, OSX and Android (beta).
It's free and it's open-source.
It also does x264 encoding when needed and is available for all your machines now without any strings attached.
TODO: 753) write sig.