Next Knoppix Release to Feature GPL'd FreeNX

linuxtag-reporter writes "The first day of LinuxTag, Europe's biggest Free Software event (expecting 25,000 visitors) already has one big highlight. It seems that Fabian Franz from the Knoppix Project hacked up a 'FreeNX Server' based on NoMachine's NX technology (poor NoMachine might lose business now). Fabian Franz presented a first preview of the 'GPL Edition' in a live demo together with Kurt Pfeifle. The demo showed sessions going from Germany to Italy just based on a slow WLAN connectivity (shared with hundreds of visitors). A connection lost due to bad network conditions was easily re-connected to, and a deliberately suspended session was revitalized too -- it was just like 'screen' with a GUI! A report on the official LinuxTag webpage says FreeNX will be publically released for the first time as part of the upcoming Knoppix-3.6 release. The Kalyxo project is building and hosting Debian packages of FreeNX and NX/GPL for everyone to use."

What do these things do?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Besides being part of a future Knoppix release, what is NX?

Please assume that some readers (me, others?) don't know what "screen" is.

Maybe I should google for "linux screen knoppix" - that would be useful...

I could click on the nomachine.com link, but why should I have to?

-ac

Re:What do these things do?

[tachin (590622)]

I could click on the nomachine.com link, but why should I have to? Maybe because that's the whole point of the web...you know...hyperlinks and all..?

Re:What do these things do?

[Aumaden (598628)]

AC: I could click on the nomachine.com link, but why should I have to?

tachin: Maybe because that's the whole point of the web...you know...hyperlinks and all..?

Hah! I was right the whole point of posting an article on Slashdot is to beat nomachine.com into a quivering mass of submission!

Seriously though, simply explaining what "NX" meant might have spared nomachine's server for at least a few more minutes.

Re:What do these things do?

[Leomania (137289)]

From the manpage for screen:

"Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a
physical terminal between several processes (typically
interactive shells)."

I use it all the time; start an interactive job while I'm at work on a particular machine using screen, disconnect using "CTRL-A d" then go home, log into the same machine, issue the command "screen -r" and I'm right back into that shell session.

These days, I mostly use TightVNC [tightvnc.com] over a VPN pipe instead, which gives me the graphical equivalent of this.

Hope this helps.

- Leo

For those looking for MoMachine info...

[missing000 (602285)]

Newsforge article [newsforge.com]

Potential source for FreeNX Server [64.233.167.104]

Re:What do these things do?

[KilobyteKnight (91023)]

So, you're saying that you should be able to get a full and complete understanding of a technical system solution from a Slashdot article blurb without doing any research of your own or without reading any of the links?

I believe what what the poster meant was that a news posting should at least have a basic overview of what the heck it's about.

I know what Knoppix is, I know what screen is, but I don't have a clue what NX is. Even descriptive adjectives would help.

I'm interested in finding out what NX is. Since the link is Sashdotted I can't at the moment. I've gotten side tracked by your anonymous flame. I will probably have forgotten about it by later today. So I'm left wondering.

The editors here signed million dollar contracts, revenue is coming in from ads and subscriptions, they've been at it for years.... you'd think they'd have learned at least a few basic journalism techniques.

I see a lot of wrong information posted as news. The most descriptive news items are typically when they lucked out and copied a good paragraph from the story link. Heck, they aren't even good at checking to see if they've already posted the story on their own site.

It's just laziness. I'd expect such from volunteers... but as I pointed out, they're getting paid well.

Re:What do these things do?

[walt-sjc (145127)]

Hmm. I was also trying to RTFA to see WTF freeNX is, but it seems as though ALL the links are slashdotted except for the kalyxo page which didn't seem to mention it.

I agree 100% that articles should give a very brief overview (hell - a one liner would be enough) so interested people can do more reading. Without the overview we have no f-ing clue what the article is talking about. Oh yeah, a google for freenx only comes up with 2 links for porn and an intro to Linux. No help there.

Re:What do these things do?

[KilobyteKnight (91023)]

Nothings changed since they started making money.

Oh, but it has. It changed from being a hobby to being a business. A business based in part on ad revenue. And I, as a consumer, for whom those ads are targetted, certainly have every right to comment on the quality of the service.

One thing that has remained pretty much the same is the quality of the service. I expect more from professionals than I do from hobbyists. And don't kid yourself into thinking they haven't entered the realm of paid professionals.

Don't get me wrong, the Slashdot crew broke ground. I respect them for that. They were among the first to do what they do. They created something wonderful. Then they got paid and have done little more than add a couple of features to the website since then. Moderating and meta-moderating and karma may help weed some of the nonsense out of the user responses, but unless they pay attention to people like me the nonsense will continue in the articles themselves.

I intend this as constructive criticism, not a troll or a flame. I want Slashdot to stay around. I just want it to be better.

Slashdot shouldn't rest on its laurels.

Re:What do these things do?

[XMyth (266414)]

Good point, lets not use the forum we have here for discussing things and just everyone be quiet and if you have any questions then keep them to yourself.

Re:What do these things do?

[dipipanone (570849)]

So, you're saying that you should be able to get a full and complete understanding of a technical system solution from a Slashdot article blurb without doing any research of your own or without reading any of the links?

Not at all. Unfortunately, there isn't even the vaguest hint of what NX is from the article -- personally, I thought it was a Needle eXchange. But I decided to Google it to check. [google.com]

I'm glad I did though, because otherwise I'd never have known they were incorporating some new lesbian porn server into forthcoming linux distros.

Poor NoMachine indeed.

[FreeLinux (555387)]

(poor NoMachine might lose business now).

This is compounded by higher bandwidth charges due to their present Slashdotting. They'll be tits up in no time.

Kudos to developers

[Metteyya (790458)]

It seems that Knoppix doesn't stop surprising everyone, being probably the most innovative Linux distro (introduced LiveCD and great hardware detection).
It would be great if other distro's developers tried going the same way - be innovative, be creative!. Now it's quite boring to have hundred of Kno* and *pix distros, every one built with philosophy "take Knoppix and replace two apps with your favourite ones".
Is there any way to financially support Knoppix?

Re:Kudos to developers

[EnglishTim (9662)]

I should point out that NoMachine's MX was (IIRC) based on existing GPLed Free Software, so this isn't stealing any more than it was for NoMachine to take that GPLed code and make a product out of it. The source code for their stuff is on their website, it's just that another group has now taken that code and put it together in an easier-to-compile distribution. (If I understand the post correctly - I could not reach the Kalyxo webpage...)

Better than VNC through compressed ssh?

[jbwiv (266761)]

I've always made out quite well with running a VNC connection through a compressed ssh pipe, like so:

$ ssh -f -CNL5901:localhost:5901 mylogin@myremotemachine

$ vncviewer localhost:1

How's NX any different/better? When it first came out, I gave it a look but didn't think speed was overly impressive...

Re:Better than VNC through compressed ssh?

[hackel (10452)]

As the original post said, you can reconnect to disconnected sessions, which is nice. A VNC can't do that if the SSH tunnel is broken. I also currently launch VNC from inetd, and once that connection's broken, there's no way to re-connect to it. I'm definitely looking forward to checking out FreeNX!

Re:Better than VNC through compressed ssh?

[4lex (648184)]

I must be unknowingly running FreeNX (under an alias to vncviewer). If vncserver is still alive, you can *always* reconnect to the session, from any computer! I use a knoppix CD, ssh -X to my machine and vncviewer my vnc session, and it works great!

Re:Better than VNC through compressed ssh?

[iantri (687643)]

It's far faster than VNC -- think how X runs over a 100mbit network except over, NX gives that performance over a 1.5mbit DSL connection. It is still tolerable at 56k (more so than VNC, in my own experience).

(By the way, it is actually just connecting to your X server with nxproxy over an SSH link.)

Poor NoMachine ?

[gmuslera (3436)]

That looked like an apology for closed formats...Poor Adobe, they opened most of the PDF specification and lose business too, of course, doing that also helped to make their specification almost an universal standard, feasible to be used in organizations without the problems related to closed formats (arbitrary changes from vendor, disappearing vendor, low extensibility, etc) and in the long run increased the market for them.

NoMachine opening the specification of what they do just will have a different market if the use of they technology standarizes enough. That will open doors to they own extensions, support, being anyway as the visible head of that technology, etc. I think that some of the ESR writings explain a bit better the advantages of doing that.

Strange Bedfellows

[daves (23318)]

A quick Google search led to interesting results. What do RMS and these ladies have to do with a server?

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient& ie =UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=freenx

NoMachines

[Qwavel (733416)]

It's great that this technology can now be incorporated directly into distributions, but I'm sorry that this couldn't be done with NoMachines rather than against them.

The vast majority of companies don't create Linux products, they create Windows products, so any company that creates new software for Linux should be appreciated, even if that software is closed source.

I'm definately not suggesting that any company involved in Linux should be given a free ride, I'm just saying that we shouldn't celebrate having outflanked a company that was contributing something to Linux.

BTW, I don't know anything about NoMachines in particular. Also, generally I think that the necessity of software being open source and free depends on where it fits into your system. Personally I don't mind close source applications, but I like to have my GUI toolkit open and free.

what NX is

[CoJoNEs (73698)]

This was linked from NoMachine's site, somehow I got to it before it died.
http://www.newsforge.com/software/03/07/10/2146247 .shtml?tid=11 [newsforge.com]
from the article:
Thin client computing lets users run applications on a remote server and display the results locally. NX Client works something like VNC (see our recent story), but instead of using Remote Frame Buffer protocol, NX Client acts as an X Window server. Thin clients help contain costs by eliminating the need to install applications at each user's desktop, and improve security by limiting the availability of applications and data. The clients themselves can be dedicated hardware devices or regular computers running thin client software.

I liked it the first time...

[omega9 (138280)]

...when it was called Citrix.

introduction to NX

[zoso (105166)]

There was nice article about the NX:

http://www.orangecrate.com/article.php?sid=677

"Poor NoMachine"

[iantri (687643)]

Just to clear things up, this is no problem for NoMachine at all -- NoMachine has released the core components as GPL -- the only non-GPL parts of NX are the client software GUI,, which simplifies the setup of basically (under Windows) cygwin ssh + X + nxproxy, and under Linux, just a GUI for ssh+ X + nxproxy.

NX is even mildly supportive of an open-source complete solution -- on the source download page (their site is ./'ed right now) it clearly says something to the effect that they expect a community-created packages will be assembled.

Connect to windows from Linux?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ (11968)]

It's not obvious from what I've been able to connect to so far that isn't slashdotted as to whether you can connect to a Windows box from a Linux box (the orangecrate.com article linked further down shows a connection going from a windows box to a linux box)

That's actually 2 questions, though - "Does the technology support it" AND "does the LICENSE allow it?"

I'm assuming that the technical capability is there (just as it is in VNC)...

Last time I saw the EULA for a recent Windows version I saw in infamous "you may not connect with 3rd-party tools" clause in the license. Is that still there? Is using FreeNX (or VNC or anything else) to connect to a windows box remotely still a violation of the license?

KDE NX?

[illogic (52099)]

I wonder how this affects the proposed KDE/NX integration supposedly under development by Aaron Seigo? If you'll remember, this was mentioned way back in December [kdenews.org] in response to UserLinux shipping Gnome, but I haven't heard anything about it since... let's hope this FreeNX is desktop-independent.

For those still mystified as to what NX is, it is essentially X11 tunneled through SSH, with some clever caching to drastically limit the number of connections an X server/client need to make, to make the connection feel much quicker.

untechnical explanation: Normally a remote X session will have to make many hundreds/thousands of trips between the server and client, but NX uses a cache at both ends, only making the most necessary trips, and usually just sending a diff of the changes rather than the whole stream of data. (roughly speaking, of course, as I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about.)

Re:VNC

[jrcamp (150032)]

VNC performance has always been unacceptable to me, even on LAN's. NX uses the X11 protocol, but it encrypts (via SSH) and compresses by itself so you don't have to open an SSH tunnel, etc. It can also play the sound on the local host.

Re:VNC

[Leomania (137289)]

Like anything else, it depends upon what you're trying to do and how much performance you need/want.

Me, I use TightVNC over a VPN tunnel (cable modem) and it has acceptable performance. I do pay a performance hit when I use a graphical program such as a place & route tool (I'm an ASIC engineer) but it's by no means unusable.

Of course, I have been forced to use that same place & route tool over a 128Kbit ISDN line (years ago) so I'm quite pleased with what VNC allows me to do, both in terms of spee

Re:VNC

[zoso (105166)]

NX is about networking - high latency/long distance(many hops) - are enough to run X applications.

Printing support. Connect to remote NX server - and print on your local printer.

Multimedia support - launch xmms remotely and hear the sound in your headphones ....

Re:Knoppix is great for the KDE crowd...

[porcorosso (178451)]

It's a real easy way to get debian installed on your hard drive.

Boot up, hit Ctrl-Alt-F2, type knx-hdinstall.

Re:Knoppix is great for the KDE crowd...

[Lussarn (105276)]

It is also a good place to start if you want more graphics in a gentoo install. Knoppix sometimes find hardware better then the gentoo install CD and it has all that is needed to install it. Which of course is basically nothing if you have a net connection.

Re:Knoppix is great for the KDE crowd...

[BLKMGK (34057)]

In my case Knoppix-STD has been awesome! It's allowed me to play with wireless security tools that I had previously had a bitch of a time trying to configure in a standard Linux Distro. No driver fiddling, no recompiling, no patches, no hair pulling! i fire up Knoppix-STD, plug ni my Lucent card, run an applet to configure my wireless, and away I go with Kismet, Airsnort, Wallenreiter (sp?), Airtraf, and other tools like Ethereal. Knoppix has allowed me, a Windows user, to experience and get accustomed to Linux without having to worry about hosing a drive or sweating arcane drivers issues. If I screw something up or get lost I can simply reboot and be back to square one with no damage done. as soon as I figure out how to mount a USB FOB and install my own apps on it etc. I'll be well on my way to moving a Linux partition onto my HD full time :-)

IMO, Knoppix provides a terrific way to introduce people to Linux. You can also use it to (more) securely surf on strange computers if you want. I see someone has linked to soemthing called Gnoppix below this - I'll be checking that out next! Live Distros rock! :-)

Re:Knoppix is great for the KDE crowd...

[kfg (145172)]

The biggest benefit is that you can hand a disk to someone and say, "Here, try Linux." They don't have install 'er nothin', just boot from it.

The next biggest would be that it's an ultra-super rescue disk.

And bit less important, to me at least, but still a virtue, is that you can pop it into any machine, say a friends, one at work, or a clients and run in your prefered enviroment.

KFG

Re:Knoppix is great for the KDE crowd...

[ldspartan (14035)]

knoppix is _great_ as a recovery / analysis tool. For instance, I'm installing XP on some machine and can't figure out what kind of ethernet card it has... Linux has 'lspci', but XP just reports "Unknown network card."

I can boot into Knoppix, lspci, download the drivers I need from Intel's site, and put them on the disk for Windows to find.

Another good example is my boss, who's laptop drive crashed a few weeks ago. While he waited for a replacement, he ran everything off of Knoppix and a USB Key.

It's impressive stuff.

--
lds

Re:Knoppix is great for the KDE crowd...

[IceFox (18179)]

As with everything in life the hardest part is the first step. Getting users to play with this Linux thing is much easier with Knoppix. People who I interact with all the time, but never wished to try Linux were willing to give Knoppix a try. Ok so maybe they don't switch the next day, but a month later when they need a tool that they saw in Knoppix they give it another whirl or when someone else talks about Linux they think... "Yah I used that, it wasn't hard... I like Linux". Maybe when they get an extra computer they decide to load Linux on it. All because you gave them a Knoppix disk.

It is a great simple way to let management play with Linux too. Where in the management world of MSOutlook and MSProject they can't load Linux on their box, but they can give Knoppix a whirl on *their* box and play with it on their own. Then when you want to use Linux for your next project they are more likely to let you because it is something they have used and doesn't seem so foreign.

It might surprise you the number of people who want to play around with Linux, but just haven't yet. I put up a small note that I was giving away Knoppix disks for free at work. I have given away (averaging two) a day for the last month. Try it at your work and see what happens. You might be surprised at whom is interested in playing with Linux.

-Benjamin Meyer

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[hackel (10452)]

Heh, you obviously don't understand the point of Free software. In general, having that product available as Free software will attract much more users than the few at that particular company that might go out of business. If they are -smart-, they will assist the open source development effort, and re-tailor their business to provide expert integration solutions of FreeNX, etc.
It's all about -service- and developing code, not re-selling code over and over again without doing any work. That's the difference. They don't have to go out of business, just change their old business model.

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[Viking Coder (102287)]

People who use leaches to treat maladies like an imbalance of the humours are having a tough go of it, too.

Not every economy and market will live. I'm actually someone who writes code professionally, but I can acknowledge that it's more like mathematics - very few "mathematicians" are hired to do things that they used to, because now computers and calculators can do those simple tasks. It may well be that in the future, people are unwilling to pay for applications software without source code and the rig

You are wrong

[RenatoRam (446720)]

NoMachine had opensourced the NX products, so anybody has the legal right of forking and renaming it.

Nothing particularly new: firms will continue to give money to NoMachine for support and administration tools.

Have fun...

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[agoliveira (188870)]

Actually, you are wrong indeed.
All the core NX technology is GPL. The proprietary part is based on them. What Fabian did was to take those components and create it's own version of this part.

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[finkployd (12902)]

But an F/OSS hacker has taken a company's proprietary work and made it available for free, even giving it a similar name.

Why is this a good thing?


Have they taken (ie stolen) the company's work? Or did they simply re-implement a commercial product's functionality from scratch? In the latter case I don't believe there is anything wrong with that (and seemingly neither do you, since you seem to be in support of Linux). In fact I consider that to be a very good thing. Complaining about that is like complaining that couples getting married and having sex out of love is hurting prostitution.

Finkployd

As far as I remember...

[EnglishTim (9662)]

As far as I remember, NoMachine's NX software is based on GPL code, which means they had no choice but to release the source code.

I remember trying to build it from source when it first came out, but it proved rather tricky. It's nice that someone's now put in the time to make an easy-to-compile distribution of it.

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[zgornz (318679)]

NX is a PUBLIC standard, they WANT other implementations of it. Nothing becomes real mainstream if it's closed, look at HTTP/FTP/SMTP/VNC those are all standards. Then you have closed things, like IM where there are a million different closed protocols (and yes a few open ones).

Knoppix is implementing a protocol that NX released, they also released a proprietary implementation of it. Obviously they want people to buy theirs, but they published the protocol so that others could use it to. (In turn making th

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[Martin Blank (154261)]

Nothing becomes real mainstream if it's closed

Yeah, that Windows product will never catch on!

Sorry. I had to. I couldn't help it. The voices told me to.

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[Bob9113 (14996)]

But an F/OSS hacker has taken a company's proprietary work

If I understand correctly, (s)he only took their Free work. The core of the NoMachine product is GPL.

and made it available for free ... Why is this a good thing?

Speaking strictly from a capitalist standpoint, it is good because it reduces the cost to businesses that wish to use this technology. Similarly, the freeness of HTTP software (client and server) has been a great boon to corporations that wish to provide easy access to information about their product lines. This has in turn lead to consumers making more informed decisions, which is one of the keystones of free market capitalism. (that's just the good part, in response to your question, see below for a look at the bad part)

even giving it a similar name.

The similarity in the name is the "NX" part. I believe NX is a Free protocol. This is much like referring to both Sendmail and Postfix as SMTP engines.

If F/OSS developers want to speed up Linux, the corporate environment is where they should be looking. By doing this they have enabled corporations to get something for free

Very well said. This statemtnt (which clearly supports FLOSS) seems to be in contrast to the rest of your post.

which could cause a company (and a lot of potential Linux users) to go out of business.

All competition has this effect, whether from proprietary or Free sources. Are Chevrolet and Ford evil because they caused Yugo to go out of business?

How are the developers supposed to feed their children if they're unemployed?

They can't. But this makes a leap from "FreeNX removed or reduced the ability to charge twice for solving a problem once" to "developers will be unemployed." That is a spurious leap. The ideal situation, from an economic standpoint, would be for each solution to each problem to be developed once, and the development effort compensated once, freeing the development resource to move on to the next problem. The increased pool of available software labour resources would reduce the time delay businesses incur in solving their information problems, but does not necessarily reduce the time value of solving any given problem the first time. If we begin to approach software development as a temporally-oriented problem solving service, one cannot accurately predict the effect on the wages paid - the economic shift is too great to predict the result on the supply side - but the demand side will be very happy indeed.

We have not yet developed the economic models to make this a practical reality yet, but with FLOSS operating in tension with proprietary software, the economic stage has been set. This is the typical first stage in every major economic advancement - new technology, in this case zero cost reproduction of information, makes new economic models possible. The shift to the implementation of those new economic models must necessarily occur after the technological advancement, and so a period of market inefficiency occurs. It's not a bad thing, any more than Ford's assembly line was bad for Daimler Benz.

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[MenTaLguY (5483)]

How are the developers supposed to feed their children if they're unemployed?

The vast majority of programming jobs have been, and always will be, doing custom work for a specific clients' needs (whether working in-house or as a contractor).

Free Software doesn't affect that much.

Re:A day late and a dollar short

[proj_2501 (78149)]

emacs can do that! what other apps do you need anyway?

Try this link

[missing000 (602285)]

Introduction to NX technology [64.233.167.104]

Re:WTF is FreeNX??

[zoso (105166)]

NX uses CUPS for printing support so you can print from remote servers to your local printers using the IPP 1.1 protocol. It's possible also to use my local printers exported by SAMBA which is quite useful ...

Re:TightVNC is great

[cduffy (652)]

TightVNC is still horrifically slow (and somewhat bandwidth-consumptive) compared to RDP -- try them side-by-side some time.

Halfway between Citrix and VNC

[charnov (183495)]

Think stateless migratable multiuser VNC sessions (last time I checked VNC was not multiuser...only one desktop after all). NoMachines product gets a lot closer to Citrix, which is one of three killer apps on Windows that does not have a decent analog in Linux (also Quark XPress [Scribus doesn't come close], Citrix [no X11 isn't even the same type of idea, neither is VNC], and unfortunately, Exchange (although SuSe's OpenExchange server is very, very close).