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."

Correct me if I'm wrong

[Tim_F]

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?

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

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

Better than VNC through compressed ssh?

[jbwiv]

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...

Screen for a GUI...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is something we're supposed to be able to do already. See again the now archaic 'xmove' project, a X11 proxy that still works today... as long as you don't intend to use any X extensions, or 3D, and so on. Oops. (Hey, at least you can run XMMS with it, sort of. This is actually a 'failing' of the X architecture, in that it's too flexible for its own good. Look into the reasons why xmove can't handle extensions for enlightenment.)

NX has long seemed like pretty cool stuff; I'm not sure if they've baked the 3D aspect, or exactly how well it works in person, but a completely Free version -- especially if it proves a lifesaver as regards emulating 'Fast User Switching' on a single UNIX desktop -- can only improve the market for their services/support business and so on.

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

[BLKMGK]

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...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found it to be a nice tool for "caulking up" holes in many ways. So far at my research/computer scientist job, I've used it to fix a windows machine (dd, repartition, fiddle a few files) and, more interestingly, run numerical-computation intensive linux applications on the new, faster (winXP pro) management computers, many of which were sitting idle.

The Quantian variant is very good for the latter; it has almost all of the basic GNU sci/math software: R, gnuplot, octave, &c. set up and ready to "just work". It also has some built-in cluster support; drop-and-churn clustering for numerical computations sounds pretty nice, though I haven't tried that yet.

Unfortunately, the NTFS support is poor. This is probably for legal reasons rather than bona-fide technical ones. :( I am presently mulching up a USB memory stick as my home directory.

Re:VNC

[Leomania]

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 speed but more importantly in terms of freedom. When you do ASIC layout work for a living, you sacrifice a lot of family time if you can't detach/reattach ala VNC. So I'm pretty damned thankful.

That's not to say I don't welcome new applications if they better meet my needs. I'll be delighted to learn more about what NX offers just as soon as I can actually visit the proferred links!

- Leo

Re:VNC

[zoso]

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 ....

Bad name

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody mentioned what's FreeNX so I google'd it - it means porn in some parts of the world.

Time to think up another name?

Put it in a more positive light

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that they might lose business, its inclusion in the Knoppix distro means people are more likely to be exposed to it and buy into it for their company. Don't think that as people rise up the ladder they always forget their roots. Now I'm getting into a position in life where I make the decisions about what software to deploy it's actually a major moral and financial decision how
to support and feed back into open projects.
My business thinking right now is to support small local projects (British and European for me) and broader organisations that foster and support Open projects like EFF. Funds are less likely to go to projects that are already making their own commercial noises, but of course I wish them the best of luck. Im sure they recognise that funds don't always have to flow directly to the originator, that Open source is a broad movement and sometimes unfair to contributers. So, in summary - small donations to the little local guys, and larger orgs. In the middle ground we usually hope to contribute by returning non-sensitive code imporovements back into the CVS.

Re:Better than VNC through compressed ssh?

[spif]

use x0rfbserver instead. it lets you connect to an existing X session with VNC, instead of having to spawn a new Xvnc session from vncserver.

It's available as part of a Dag Wieers RPM [wieers.com], so if you're running Red Hat or Fedora Core you're set. And of course the source is a google away.

Re:What do these things do?

[Anonymous Coward]

This brings me on to a question I have wondered for a while. I am no linux/X guru and everyone I have asked this to before has ignored me or not known. and my searching abilities obviously arent up to scratch.

Is there a way of reattatching a running X application to a different X server without having to kill it & re-open it? I use screen all the time for IRC and I use tightVNC as well, but sometimes VNC can get a bit heavy on my connection. It would be nice if I could take a single running X application with me without havign to take the whole desktop.

Thanks in advance.

Re:Terminal services

[Anonymous Coward]

Essentially. Except it uses X with some additional compression techniques.

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

[IceFox]

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:VNC

[zoso]

argh I forgot to mention the disk shareing - so you export your local disk/home directory to the remote server trough SMB that is encapsulated in NX protocol and here it comes - you can use your files on remote server copy them/edit them and do whatever you want in secure way without the need to scp every few minutes.

Re:Better than VNC through compressed ssh?

[iantri]

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.)

Connect to windows from Linux?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

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?

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

[Lussarn]

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:What do these things do?

[walt-sjc]

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:Better than VNC through compressed ssh?

[4lex]

I agree :)

But reconnectability is great, specially when you mantain the same session across differents computers, some of them with windows (with which I have to use knoppix, in order both not to be tainted and not to break anything). I am somewhat of a newbie and always have problems with my hosts.allow and hosts.deny... so it's better (for me!) just to allow ssh, and do everything the "ssh -XC" way.

Genuine question: what are the other benefits from vnc, aside from reconnectability and (lossful) compression?

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

[linefeed0]

I'm sorry, no. Gnoppix is for some idiotic reason based on debian stable. I run debian stable as a sysadmin on old workhorse machines which are used primarily as servers (including command-line timesharing, so not just "invisible" machines). I can't stand running it more than a year after its typical release on a desktop -- the linux desktop is moving fast and woody already lacks a lot of hardware support. I honestly don't know how the gnoppix folks are compensating for this with hardware detection and all. Also, I know gnoppix has modern gnome packages, but they're backports, which makes them different from debian testing by default, and it's just one more variable to debug. There's really no point in basing a bootcd on stable; it's like basing a bootcd on RHEL.