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Remote Desktop Backend Merged into Wayland
New submitter Skrapion writes "One month ago, an independent developer submitted patches to the Wayland's Weston compositor which adds support for FreeRDP, an open-source remote desktop protocol. Now, after six revisions, the remote desktop code has been merged into the trunk. While remote desktop has been prototyped in Weston once before by Wayland developer Kristian Høgsberg, this is the first time Wayland/Weston has officially supported the feature. For a summary of why we can expect Wayland's remote desktop to surpass X.Org's network transparency, see Daniel Stone's excellent talk from Linux.conf.au."
Presumably RDP can handle rootless windows. VNC does not have that option at this moment. That means that RDP will work much like xforwarding and be usable over ssh, whereas with VNC you need to start a VNC-session and click around on the desktop to start programs.
You would be wrong then. RDP 6.1 along with Windows Server 2008 introduced RemoteApp which allows a single application to be forwarded rather than a whole desktop.
Nobody understands X11 then, because Wayland devs are also X11 devs. Enjoy.
Hmm. A pedantic retort that completely ignores the root issue. Are you one of the fan boys, or am I misinterpreting your post?
The issue is that the end user functionality of using remote desktop like features under X11, Xorg, Wayland, all suck massive balls when compared to the likes of RDP and ICA. The only thing close to being as unpleasant to use as X11 is VNC. They may have been the best available in 1995, but they have sucked since then and continue to do so today. Any attempt to defend them in this regard is a clear indication that the defender has never used the the other products or attempted to do an real graphical work over a connection of less than 10Mbps.
RDP is no panacea. But, it is many times faster than X11-esque methods, most especially on lower bandwidth connections.
The very fact that FreeNX exists is absolute proof that X has fundamental issues and you have admitted that those issues exist and that another layer of complexity needs to be added around X is a direct admission that X isn't cutting it!
You also lied in your original post when you said you forward over X and therefore X is transparent.
1. No you don't forward over X, you use a much more convoluted FreeNX setup.
2. Forwarding != Transparency. If you think it does, then FreeRDP is also network transparent! Modern X is basically a less-efficient screen-scraping version of RDP, and everything that FreeNX does makes X more like RDP in a kludgy manner!
3. Please stop insulting X developers who have put a whole lot more time and effort into developing these systems than you have ever done. If you were more respectful you'd actually watch the video in TFA and come up with an intelligent response instead just repeating over & over that "I GOT AN XTERM TO FORWARD EVERYONE ELSE IS STUPID!"
Being disingenuous and hiding the truth.. which is exactly what you did in your original post when you said "X" and really meant the kludge-fest that is "FreeNX" is also a form of censorship, so try being more honest and less sanctimonious, self-righteous, and obscene in the future, mkay?
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I used NX for X11 over VPN. It works very well and I am able to resume where I left off if my VPN connection drops or I want to let something run overnight but don't want to remain online. NoMachine closed source their server at version 4.0, but FreeNX and Neatx took its place.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
RDP on windows at least outperforms VNC by a wide margin both on fast and slow network connections.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Hi, I am Marc-Andre Moreau, founder and leader of the FreeRDP project. I was not directly involved with the FreeRDP Wayland backend. First, definitely take this backend as a first step. There is a *lot* more than can be done in the future, and I can tell you it has the potential to make your best dreams come true in terms of remote desktop. Here is a screencast I took about a month ago showing FreeRDP on Linux connecting to Windows 8 with RemoteFX, playing videos with sound smoothly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUF8xPKBQJM Even if this is impressive at this point, it is just a fraction of what we're going after in the future. RemoteFX was introduced in RDP 7.1, and is what FreeRDP implements. It basically encodes everything on-the-fly for fast encoding on the server and fast decoding on the client. This means the videos played in that remote desktop session I've recorded are re-encoded to RemoteFX, they are not sent as H264. RDP also provides a functionality allowing the redirection of the compressed video stream for local decoding and playback, but from experience RemoteFX provides a better user experience. RDP may be a protocol designed by Microsoft, it is part of the Microsoft Open Specifications. The long term goal of the project is not to make it a "FreeRDP to Microsoft" technology, but really to make it a "FreeRDP to FreeRDP" technology, where high quality clients and servers will be available for all platforms in existence. Like it or not, RDP is an extremely powerful protocol that has all the potential necessary to compete with leading commercially-supported alternatives, except that this one is open specification and open source with FreeRDP. We are also considering the possibility of defining our own community extensions to the RDP protocol to fill in the gaps left by Microsoft. We currently have clients on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Android and iOS. We have servers (still in their early stage) on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and now Wayland. All of this is available under the Apache license. One common mistake about RDP is to compare only in terms of the core feature set, which is graphics remoting and input. RDP provides support for disk redirection, audio input and output redirection, multimedia redirection, smartcard redirection, printer redirection, usb device redirection, multitouch input, serial & parallel device redirection, etc. It has a very rich set of security features which we work very hard on supporting well (Network Level Authentication, TS Gateway, etc). As for graphics remoting, it is very elaborate in the RDP protocol, and it just keeps getting better with newer versions of the protocol. The next step for us is to jump on RDP8 support, which will bring many new features such as a progressive graphics codec, dynamic adaptation based on changing network conditions, a high performance codec for anti-aliased fonts, support for multitransport (TCP + UDP), enhanced support for WAN and higher-latency/low bandwith environments, etc. All of this can be brought to all platforms with the FreeRDP project, for the benefit of all. Brace yourselves, FreeRDP is coming.
Essentially, the client can request a bitmap representation of an element, or the native UI component. For example, common UI components are sent as UIElements and SkinParts. SkinParts can be sent as vector items (like gradients, lines, etc), or bitmaps themselves. So, for example if you run calc.exe, the client can request the app as a stack of UI elements (essentially, how the GDI plans on drawing the components to the screen). All the buttons, etc. are sent as a component package which describes how the element should look. If it uses a bitmap as a part of its chrome, it is sent as a separate SkinPart.
You can also get bitmap representations of components if the OS thinks it is too difficult to draw them (or the developer just threw a bunch of bitmaps together to represent common UI components). When this happens, calls into the GDI update the RDP server to let it know that a component of size X/Y at X/Y has updated. It's a lot smarter than VNC which has to watch the screen and updates the screen in a 1/x method.
X11 is a bit more primitive... It expects the UI components to be created and skinned by the client. This is really only useful/consistent if both the client and the server are running the same WM. Users of RDP get the same experience regardless of their client.