Ask Slashdot: Open Source Remote Application Access?

First time accepted submitter taikedz writes "Citrix Xenapp with Receiver/Metaframe allows publishing individual applications installed on a Windows server to users on remote machines. These applications open in their own windows, along side others as if they were installed locally. I am looking to do the same at home, with free software, publishing applications from Mac, Linux, and Windows machines (and yes, I've verified the license agreements for the apps I am going to do this with!). Up until now, the only alternatives I have found are full-on remote desktop login, not seamlessly-integrated. Can you recommend any tools that can achieve the goal of remote individual application access across platforms for free or at low-cost?"

Comments

SSH + TCP port forwarding

[aglider]

Read the friendly manual!

Re:SSH + TCP port forwarding

[julesh]

google before you post OP. sweet fuck.

To be fair on OP, it seems that at least some of the applications they want to run are running under Windows and/or Mac environments, for which this solution does not apply.

Virtualizing a single application's windows from a remote machine is a non-trivial task that AFAIK hasn't been implemented in open source software for either of these platforms. The closest you'll get is by virtualizing the entire OS -- VirtualBox with Windows guests (and Windows only) can do this. You'd then have to run the virtualbox virtual machine process as an X client, and use X-over-SSH forwarding as described in many existing posts to get the windows to appear on the target machine. Performance will be poor (although my one experience of citrix suggests its performance was equally bad, so maybe you can tolerate that).

You didn't mention speed or efficiency

[93 Escort Wagon]

So, X11.

Re:You didn't mention speed or efficiency

[93 Escort Wagon]

Feeling a bit defensive, are we, Mr. Scheifler?

X forwarding

[Hatta]

This has been a feature of X since before X11. It's even easier to use now with SSH supporting X forwarding. And if you're using it across the public internet, you can get good performance with FreeNX.

Unfortunately, this is all likely to go away if X is deprecated in favor of Wayland.

Re:X forwarding

[jgrahn]

I must be doing something wrong or GUI toolkits these days aren't designed as well for X forwarding

Quite frequently. Many of the problems which modern replacements of venerable older parts of GNU/Linux are being designed to solve are caused not by bad tools but by people who don't know how to use them.

X11 is neither GNU nor Linux; it began as another lump of free software ... but apart from that, +1.

Back in the 1990s, it was understood that X11 programming had an network efficiency aspect. For example, forcing a network roundtrip for some common user-level operation was considered bad, because N*x milliseconds can easily become a long time.

Re:X forwarding

[Electricity Likes Me]

SSH is ridiculously slow for things that aren't text sessions (and the amount of advice which is "do your backup over SSH" is staggering considering this).

Over any reasonably fast link you need to be running the HPN-SSH patchset to get performance above 2 mb/s in my experience. The MT-AES cipher also helps (though breaks if your application forks, though I've found very few cases where this is a problem currently in practice).

Two easy solutions

[Burning1]

First, if you haven't already read up on Xwindows networking model, you really should. X natively supports what you're requesting, and has for decades. In most cases, it's as trivial as opening a ssh connection to the remote machine, using the -X flag. E.g. 'ssh -X remotehost'

If you need to support Windows applications, you can use RDP in seamless mode. Newer RDP clients for windows support this natively, with a little configuration work. There is some support in the linux RDP client, but when I tried it about a year ago, it required a special helper application to work. Be aware that RDP is no where near as fast as Citrix.

Finally, if you simply want Windows applications to seamlessly integrate with a linux desktop or visa versa, VMWare player/workstation supports a seamless virtualization mode. It would not surprise me if KVM or Xen have a comparable feature, but I haven't played with them on the desktop long enough to know.

rdesktop

[doas777]

Have you looked at these solutions? https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SeamlessVirtualization

CORRECTION - "NX"

[scorp1us]

http://www.nomachine.com/
I'm sorry, my mind pulled the server, not the client side of the question.

The NoMachine server/client is amazingly fast.

Re:CORRECTION - "NX"

[HappyHead]

Also of note - the server runs only on Linux/Unix, however as asked in the original post, NX Server will allow you to run just a single application at once, and with careful setup (ie: virtualGL), you can even run very graphics-card intensive applications on the server, accessing the server's graphics hardware for GL, and send that rendered application to the client. It's free for limited personal/educational use, and requires a license for large-scale access.

It supports awesome features like restoring sessions - since the session runs on the server, if you are disconnected by a network hiccup, you can re-connect, and your program will still be running uninterrupted.

There are also several projects in progress to attempt to make an open source version, since the protocols themselves are open sourced and freely available. Sadly, I haven't seen any of them that are actually fully completed and working for all of the aspects that my work uses NX for, so we haven't been able to use any of them. Several of those projects look like they were abandoned years ago, though.

Google's NeatX project is one of the most complete that I've seen, and I don't see any development on it since 2009...

OSS citrix replacement

[zerointeger]

http://www.ulteo.com/home/ is a simple drop in replacement for citrix.

WinSwitch

[ninjackn]

For home use I recommend Window Switch. You could roll your own DIY solution with a combination of xpra, X11, vnc, rdesktop, ssh and so on but WinSwitch already does all that for you.

Windows Application license time-sharing?

[Richard_J_N]

What I'd like to know is whether we can have a way to time-share Windows applications. Consider an office of 100 people. At the moment, they all of MS Office installed, just in case they get an attachment that LibreOffice can't handle. That's 100 copies of the MSO license.

We'd like to move them to Linux, and LO, but still need that MSO capability just occasionally. So the obvious way is to set up 100 free desktops, and put 5 Windows+MSO machines in the corner, people can then walk over, queue up, and use the MSO machines if they really must. Result: only pay MS for 5 licenses, and start escaping lock-in.

But that's really ugly. Is there any elegant way to do this seamlessly for the end user, with VNC or similar? We need to ensure that 100 people can all (potentially) access MSO in their own environmnent (own PC, own view of the fileshare, if possible, own preferences), but with some sort of queuing system that shares out the access.

I'm aware of the ugliness if 6 people need MSO at the same time, and that this might not work well for video, or advanced powerpoint. But otherwise, how might it be done? (And given that MS might not *like* it, how do we stay legally covered. IMHO, this is perfectly fair, because MSO is only ever installed on 5 PCs, and only ever used by 5 people at a time).

Re:X forwarding ... is useless

[jedidiah]

Use VNC?

That's funny.

VNC is a pig even on a LAN.

Caching and compression with X is much more effective.

While X haters were busy repeating 20 year old arguments, the rest of the world caught up with Unix. Now if you gut remote desktop access, you will just be making Linux look like it's 20 years behind.

You've got to bake this stuff in. You can't just ignore it. There's really no way around it. Otherwise you end up with stuff like what Mac users are stuck with.

got to disagree, VNC beats X

[Chirs]

Maybe if you have brand new applications written properly then X is okay. However, I have old legacy apps that require many round-trips between the X client and server to do the simplest things. For a cross-country link with 60ms ping it is *FAR* faster to use VNC than to use X.

RemoteApp

[Arricc]

A little known add on for Windows clients: RemoteApp for Hyper-V. It allows Windows clients (XP+) to be used as seamless application hosts for RDP clients.

http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/gabeknuth/archive/2010/01/06/RemoteApp-for-Hyper_2D00_V-_2D00_-Microsoft_2700_s-single_2D00_user-app-solution.aspx

Caveat: does not require Hyper-V

regardless, make it fast by fewer colors

[raymorris]

No matter what protocol you choose, the right color palette can make it MUCH faster. most business applications look fine with 256 colors. modern desktops typically use millions of colors. 256 colors is SO much more responsive than 16 million.