Chrome OS To Support "Legacy" PC Apps Through Remote Access 95
adeelarshad82 writes "According to a message posted to a public mailing list dedicated to Chrome OS, a new feature is in the works that will grant users access to 'legacy PC applications' through some kind of remote desktop connection process. Google software engineer Gary Kamark, who first spilled the beans on the feature, calls the process 'Chromoting.' The current speculation amongst Chrome enthusiasts is that the Chromoting process is more akin to a VPN/sharing functionality than anything else. In that case, one would have to leave one's Windows-based desktop or laptop system on in order to access apps via a connected Chrome OS computer — which is hardly a technological leap given that numerous applications today offer users an analogous screen-sharing / remote access functionality."
Put another way (Score:4, Funny)
FreeNX (Score:5, Insightful)
If they make it go through their authentication systems instead of publishing an external IP address that could be a lot safer - ie, as long as the computer's properly protected and access is limited to the appropriate IP range it shouldnt pose any greater risk than running a legacy app on a computer you're sitting at
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Tho it appears there is still no windows server. Gonna need that before its a viable solution.
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All the goodness of Linux with a measure of "backwards compatibility" - because that is what general users want.
General users like the idea of Linux, but fear they will have to learn something new (OpenOffice is _so_ much different than MSOffice of course...).
I still remember fondly the Slax "Kill Bill Edition" back from 2005 - it had some wine integration.
The new target for Linux though
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You're missing a very important point:
Only a masochist puts Linux on a Mac. This is why hackintoshes exist in the first place: because sometimes Linux is NOT an adequate solution!
Your chances of converting somebody who is running OS X to Linux is approaching zero, outside the lab at least.
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Well, I discovered today I am a masochist... great
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You're a fag. Linux works better on most legacy Macs than OS X does.
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> All the goodness of Linux with a measure of "backwards compatibility" - because that is what general users want.
Nah. What general users want is Windows.
Google has the money to make Wine work. (Score:2)
If Google wants to do this right they should just make Wine work well enough to run the most important specialist Windows applications. Later on Chrome can support virtual machines from Googles server.
news at eleven (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:news at eleven (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the idea here is to provide attractive functionality at a disguised cost. Once Apple switched over to Intel processors, anyone could run Windows on their Macs. But hardly anyone did, because who wants to reboot so often?
This will be touted the same way: "Keep your Windows apps!" But in the end, everyone will wind up using Google Docs, Gmail, etc. And that's just how Google wants it.
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That's why companies like VMware or VirtualBox stepped up and filled the void when Apple went to commodity chips.
Offering an RDP client ( or freeNX or X.. VNC... whatever ) and calling it something new and acting like they invented it sounds like Microsoft .. If they DIDN'T offer it id be concerned.
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Actually, this sound like this is going to be Google's implementation of Microsoft's RDC [microsoft.com]. Nothing wrong with that. But nothing revolutionary, either.
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It is revolutionary to the uninitiated, just like the "my first smartphone" iPhone adding multitasking is revolutionary.
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Just about everyone I know with a mac now runs parallels or VM Ware Fusion with Windows XP or Windows 7. Every mac in our office usually as the OSX Dock on the left/right of the screen and the windows start bar at the bottom running in Unity or whatever mode. Only bad part is remember in which app you need to control click versus Apple+Click.
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What would be different is making this easy enough for a typical user to do, and reliable enough to be practical. Apple has tried to do this with Back To My Mac, but that still has enough technical gotchas in most cases to be impractical for most people.
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Re:news at eleven (Score:5, Funny)
Or 10 years ago on an iPaq [wikipedia.org]. Or 23 years ago on an NCD [wikipedia.org]. And I'll bet someone will be out in a moment to tell me to get off their lawn and come up with an earlier example.
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Or 35 years ago on a VT52 [wikipedia.org] (though to be fair, back then you more or less HAD to use some sort of remote access because the computer itself was such a huge, noisy beast that nobody in their right mind would want to be in the same room for any length of time)
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Oh, they intend to implement remote control of another computer functionality. Whats the news in this, you can even do this on a iphone!
Indeed, it's a bit of a hack for backwards compatibility. To be honest, if I had to use remote desktop to access such apps then I'd use Open Cobalt as my 'desktop', since that uses VNC for 'legacy' apps, including XDMCP to spawn new instances as needed, and having a multi-user, p2p 3D desktop is more futuristic than everything in the brwser IMHO.
Probably won't work too great... (Score:3, Informative)
The iPad has a pretty nice Microsoft Remote Desktop client that I use when I need to quickly build a Windows project, or view logs from one of our Windows servers. Not really a complete solution, as obviously the standard bandwidth limits apply. If I'm on 3G or slow wifi it's borderline unusable. Still nice to have the option I suppose.
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Not sure why someone would want to invest in an OS that needs to emulate, or remote into others to get some benefit of another OS (windows or otherwise). Seems like if you need to do that, why not just use the OS you are remoting/emulating?
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We use logmein to do remote install and support. It works fine, for those tasks but even with a fast connection, there is often times a lag of a second or two for opening menus, etc..
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I use RDP across wifi ( B.. not N, not even G ) all the time to remotely access my desktop at the office ( or published apps ) and don't see a problem. Haven't tried 3G yet so you may be right there.
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What about a virtual machine combination? (Score:2)
It can work, it's just a matter of how Google wants to make it work.
VNC (Score:1, Informative)
Google Invents VNC... news at 11.
Whole forum post [google.com]:
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 20:06, Gary Kamarík wrote:
Our "official" statement at the moment is:
"We're adding new capabilities all the time. With this functionality (unofficially named "chromoting"), Chrome OS will not only be great platform for running modern web apps, but will also enable you to access legacy PC applications right within the browser. We'll have more details to share on chromoting in the coming months."
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 2:02 AM, PhistucK wrote:
Since you are being quiet about it, I just want to understand - is
Chromoting something like Remote Desktop Connection?
Yes. "something like..."
Can you spare some more details regarding this component? use cases,
platform support?
Sadly, not right now. We'll have more info later.
-Gary
Sounds pretty lame thus far. Though an unsubstantiated forum post isn't much to go on.
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So, basically, an HTML 5, canvas based VNC client ... Hasn't this been done before?
Re:VNC (Score:4, Insightful)
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Clunky (Score:2)
Not only does this sound clunky and sub-optimal in many regards, but why should I need to utilize two computers at once to enjoy functionality that only requires a single computer? At the very least it is energy inefficient.
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Re:Clunky + Wastes Energy. (Score:2)
It's because they are desperate to give people a reason - any reason - to look at the upcoming chrome-browser-based welfarebooks. Just buy a real laptop - you'll save enough energy over the life of the machine to pay for not having to leave a second computer on all the time.
"Oh, but I can access my data!"
Use a USB key.
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I am hoping that the more remote desktop usages surge, the more that our ISP will give us enough up bandwidth to make use of our computers wherever they are at.
I have a terabyte usb hard drive at home attached to my media center. Unfortunately, it is one of 4 hard drives and I did not have the foresight to only put tv shows and movies that I want and that no one else in my family would miss if I took it with me.
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Just buy a real laptop - you'll save enough energy over the life of the machine to pay for not having to leave a second computer on all the time.
Hrm... maybe. Maybe not.
My last electricity bill was $0.0618/kWh, but let's round up to $0.07. My quad-core computer, monitor, and external RAID use about 150W at idle, according to my UPS; a lower-end computer with no RAID and the monitor turned off would use less, but let's ignore that. My i3 laptop cost about $700, but let's say you can find a decent one for $600. And since we're looking at the cost of a "real laptop" vs. a Chrome OS netbook, let's subtract $350, which is the speculated mid-range price o
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Indeed even slightly changing your figures to be more realistic to an average non-slashdotter makes it not worth it.
(250 USD) / (0.07 USD/kWh) / (0.150 kW) / (7 hr/day) / (350 day/yr) = 9.7 years
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Your UPS also wastes current. No UPS is 100% efficient.
You're going to be using it at some point, so you can't take just the base draw as the total draw - otherwise, why have a computer? So the system sitting at home is not always going to be idling.
You're also ignoring the extra cooling costs because of that 150 watt heater. That's an additional 500 btus of load.
Plus, let's face it, when you spend more on a better laptop, you get more than just saving electricity. You get a better screen than your e
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Your UPS also wastes current. No UPS is 100% efficient.
I don't think that matters. I personally run a UPS, but not everyone does.
You're going to be using it at some point, so you can't take just the base draw as the total draw - otherwise, why have a computer? So the system sitting at home is not always going to be idling.
I was using it when I took the measurements - I meant "idle" as opposed to startup or heavy load. Heavy loads would mean hardcore gaming or number crunching, which you can't really do on a laptop anyway.
You're also ignoring the extra cooling costs because of that 150 watt heater. That's an additional 500 btus of load.
That translates into something like an extra 40 watts needed to run the air conditioner, using the minimum U.S. standard for residential A/C efficiency. I can save 40 watts just by turning off my monitor.
(Plus, since we're talking abou
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Welcome to the world of proprietary platforms.
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but why should I need to utilize two computers at once to enjoy functionality that only requires a single computer?
Welcome to the world of proprietary platforms.
Right, because open platforms all interoperate and don't compete with each other at all.
Go try a hybrid Gnome/KDE desktop environment on OpenNetSolarisBSDixURD for a few weeks and prove me wrong. Want to play open platform bingo with me?
Competition is good, proprietary or not.
PS
My own hands have sand castle building functionality. I suck at it.
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Huh? That wasn't even the topic. We were talking about having to use two computers to enjoy functionality that only really requires one computer. At the very least, you can log out of KDE and into GNOME. At best, KDE and GNOME cooperate on many levels, sharing systray, DBUS, etc.
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why should I need to utilize two computers at once to enjoy functionality that only requires a single computer? At the very least it is energy inefficient.
The iPad probably draws less power than the display on most desktop PCs.
flamebait? (Score:2)
The iPad probably draws less power than the display on most desktop PCs.
Now this is weird. When I say something nice about an Apple product, I'm flamebaiting?
I wouldn't be too hard on the feature (Score:2)
It will help a lot of people to have an easy to use remote desktop solution. Remove all of the client/server terminology to the end user. Just run this chromotion program on your windows pc and have the chrome station auto detect it. You privacy kooks are going to hate me for saying this: use the google cloud servers as an authentication and discovery proxy. The average slightly technical person eats this stuff up.
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so basically it will be just like hamachi or logmein then...........
which the highly nontechnical family members i have, have absolutely no problem using.
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Seems pretty cool to me (Score:2)
which is hardly a technological leap given that numerous applications today offer users an analogous screen-sharing / remote access functionality.
Perhaps not a massive technical leap but packaging and making it available to world, as only Google can, does seem like a pretty big leap forward.
I wonder if MSFT will be modifying their license agreement to try and block it?
Re:Seems pretty cool to me (Score:4, Interesting)
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I don't know the cost of terminal server licensing for windows, but for organizations with this kind of push, it may be worthwhile.
Like most MS products, the cost looks quite reasonable if you start off relatively small with, say, SBS, and upgraded as your needs have changed - or you're used to paying through the nose for licensing.
Which, to be fair, is true for probably 95+% of businesses.
For others, Windows TS complete with all appropriate CALs starts to look very expensive very quickly - and unlike many aspects of Windows licensing, CALs in use are actively tracked by a DRM module.
This is before you even consider that some proprieta
Virtual machine? (Score:2)
I haven't been following chrome OS much**, but if I wanted to run "legacy apps" on a more controlled OS these days, in a secure way, I'd do it in a virtual machine. A lot of them, especially recent ones, support RDP and/or VNC, which might fulfill the term "remote access".
** Well, come on, yet another run-a-monolithic-GUI-WIMP-app-OS, from one of the biggest software houses on the planet? Snoozefest. How about something REALLY innovative?
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For what it's worth, an injection of cash will get you most of those features (or an illegal BT downloaded keygen, not that I recommend it). VMWare Workstation gives you DirectX, copy-paste, normal-looking taskbar entries (complete with icons and names), good mouse integration, etc. I used it many times so I could do my homework in actual Word (in a Win2k8 VM (it's free if you're a student)) while programming on Linux (rebooting sucks). The only thing that doesn't work is drag-and-drop between Windows and L
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I'm hoping to see something like Joanna Rutkowska's Qubes come to fruition - http://qubes-os.org/Architecture.html [qubes-os.org]. It allows the creation of lightweight VMs to run a specific app.
Much more useful, if it's as quick as she claims. It's Linux-based for the moment.
Bored with all the Google hype (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm getting really bored with all the hype flowing from Google lately. What with Chrome OS and Google TV, there seems to be an awful lot of fuss being made over what in both cases is essentially vaporware. Anyone having tried the latest Chromium OS builds (the code base from which Chrome OS will be built) will see that this project has a very long way to go before it is anything like usable.
Especially the ChromeOS hype (Score:2, Interesting)
Look at it: it's just an OS with everything but the browser stripped out. You know what? Those other parts were actually useful and stripping them out makes no sense. GNU/Linux can run a browser just fine; it can also run quite a lot of Windows programs through Wine without the need for any kind of remoting. So, Chrome can run under Windows? Well, guess what... Linux can do that too. And it can run all the native applications out there, which by and large yield a better user experience (not to mention perfo
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Bored with all the Google hype (Score:4, Funny)
I'm getting really bored with all the hype flowing from Google lately. What with Chrome OS and Google TV, there seems to be an awful lot of fuss being made over what in both cases is essentially vaporware. Anyone having tried the latest Chromium OS builds (the code base from which Chrome OS will be built) will see that this project has a very long way to go before it is anything like usable.
Agreed. I also don't really understand the appeal of Chrome OS - it's only a browser. If this gets you excited, install the Chrome browser and fullscreen it - tadda!
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Hummm, I guess we are reading in different places. The mainstream press that I read has been pretty much obsessed with the iPad and then iPhone4 for the last couple of months.
Barely a mention of Chromium and just a few articles about Google TV - which is fine since (as you said) they don't exist yet.
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But aim it at mums, dads, and other non-techies.. (Score:3, Insightful)
"which is hardly a technological leap given that numerous applications today offer users an analogous screen-sharing / remote access functionality."
This would be true, if Apple couldn't sell a new version of phone even with the fact it can't play mp3s as ringtones.
Why remote access seems to every techie the most normal thing in the world, its a whole different ball game getting it to a level in which my mum can understand it. If they can get this right then she wont care that she could of done it 10 years ago with some other software.
Re:But aim it at mums, dads, and other non-techies (Score:4, Insightful)
This was what MS did in the days prior to the widespread internet. It provided software, only some of which was purchased, that could be freely installed on business machines. This provided an alternative to Unix hardware and software, all which had to be paid for, often at what we would now consider exorbitant prices. Of course, there were things that MS stuff could not do. We have gone full circle in that MS now wants $500 for software, while Apple is selling software for $30, and most stuff for Unix is free.
What people want is service, the technical details are of little concern. I can change any song into a ringtone for my iPhone. The fact that it is a fake m4a instead of an mp3 is of no concern. What is of a concern is that ringtones have never cost me a thing on the iPhone. If I am looking at $100 for a fake copy of MS Office, and $300 for MS Windows that will constantly hound me to prove that it is a legitimate copy, then perhaps running a copy of chrome with Google hosting all my documents is a rational thing to do. We can complain that it old tech, but it is only the early adopters that a fetishizing new tech enough to actually spend huge amounts of money on it.
Making existing "raw" tech usable is a big deal (Score:2, Informative)
There is a lot of this shit going on. *If* this is a usable VNC client that creates an easy to set up and easy to use solution for running windoze apps on Chrome this is a big deal.
It takes *work* and *skill* to make existing technology/software usable and attractive. That's why Apple is doing well, if it was easy everyone would be doing it. Please everyone just understand this simple fact.
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This is speculation, not fact (Score:2)
Umm, guys? How this works is just speculation, ripping on it for just being a VPN or damning it for being a reimplementation of existing stuff is like bitching about the plot of a movie before they've even released a summary, let alone the script or the movie itself.
Doesn't this already exist? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Don't even need to go that far. Windows 7's XP mode is simply a virtual machine in which the host remote desktop into via RDP protocol and export the app (Like RemoteApp).
A more interesting approach would be... (Score:2)
If the Chrome OS could act as a VM host, and just host the "legacy" OS as a virtual machine. Use VNC like technology sure, but put it all in one box.
Requiring 2 PCs is pure speculation.. (Score:2)
Another possibility is that Google ports something like VirtualBox over to Chrome OS. The virtualized display could then be exported to the Chrome web browser. This way only one computer would be required. In addition, any OS could be installed - not just Windows.
Of course this would only work with x86 based computers, but those requiring legacy support could easily limit themselves to these computers. Those who do not need legacy support could select an ARM based computer. The ARM based hardware sho
which is hardly a technological leap (Score:1)
It's exactly the sort of leap that Apple inexplicably get a good press for doing, even though they're not first either. Even nerds aren't interested in `first` or `advanced` any more - it's got to be easy.
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It's exactly the sort of leap that Apple inexplicably get a good press for doing, even though they're not first either. Even nerds aren't interested in `first` or `advanced` any more - it's got to be easy.
You make it sound like the "easy" requirement is new. A technology that a person can't actually use has always been worthless to that person. There is nothing inexplicable about that.
Could be same concept as OnLive? (Score:1)
But isn't it Linux ? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to run Windows apps natively on chrome it's going to certainly be possible and will be solved within hours of the OS hitting production.
games (Score:2)
If it can't play starcraft 2 natively, then at best its just a utility OS for me. Hopefully it will be able to run under virtualbox though.
Windows Server will have it (Score:2)
MS says they made 3D possible over net with the latest Windows Server with a good GPU. Of course, we are speaking about a lot of money here with a good server and very fast connection (gigabit).
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/06/07/windows_7_server_2008_r_2_sp1_beta/ [channelregister.co.uk]
"Called RemoteFX, the update to Remote Desktop Services enables hardware-accelerated graphics and the use of local USB devices for a remote user connected to a virtual machine (VM). RemoteFX is based on desktop virtualization software acqu
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Talk about bloat. Now you need an extra big server and 1Gb internet just as a bad replacement for what you could already do before. Specifically for a gaming solution, this is a terrible and impractical idea typical of Microsoft marketing departments worst failures.
For any game where quick reflexes matter (i.e. most), the extra latency when compared to running the same game locally would be terrible. Also I don't think any internet service yet offers even 100mpbs to the home affordably, let alone 1 gig.
That wont work for me (Score:2)
This clearly would not work for the usual PC gaming scenario, especially those games that require top-end 3D hardware.