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Debian GUI Software

Next Knoppix Release to Feature GPL'd FreeNX 238

Posted by michael from the x-for-everyone dept.
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."
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Next Knoppix Release to Feature GPL'd FreeNX More

Next Knoppix Release to Feature GPL'd FreeNX

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  • What do these things do? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24, 2004 @09:52AM (#9518205)
    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
    • 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..?
      • 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? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Leomania ( 137289 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:01AM (#9518335) Homepage
      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... (Score:5, Informative)

      by missing000 ( 602285 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:12AM (#9518454)
      Newsforge article [newsforge.com]

      Potential source for FreeNX Server [64.233.167.104]
    • I could click on the nomachine.com link, but why should I have to?

      You could, but it's currently slashdotted...no doubt by people like you and me wondering WTF the article is about.

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

      From what I gathered from the link before it was /.ed, NX is basically a system (client/server) for efficiently commpressing X-Window data. Personaly, I can't wait to try it; X over a busy internet connection is painful, often barely usable (in my experience anyway).
    • Here is a terrific intro to using screen... http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/9/16838/14935 [kuro5hin.org]

  • Correct me if I'm wrong (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Tim_F ( 12524 )
    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?

    • Re:Correct me if I'm wrong (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hackel ( 10452 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @09:59AM (#9518301) Journal
      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.
      • You FOSS types like to go on about 'changing their old business model'. But you never give *any* evidence, other than a few isolated cases, that this is possible in practise.

        My hypothesis is that FOSS style business models cannot replace the current proprietary models. If everything were to go FOSS, then I think a LOT of programmers would be out of jobs. I dont' have any proof of this either, but I will point out that it's human nature not to pay for things they get for free. Selling services might work fo
        • 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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by RenatoRam ( 446720 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @09:59AM (#9518310)
      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...
      • Nothing particularly new: firms will continue to give money to NoMachine for support and administration tools.

        And... NoMachine is free to incorporate anything put into the forked versions of the code back into its code tree.

    • Re:Correct me if I'm wrong (Score:5, Informative)

      by agoliveira ( 188870 ) <adilson@adilson. n e t> on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:01AM (#9518325)
      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.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:02AM (#9518347)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • 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.
    • 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
    • Isn't that the whole point of free software? To create software that is not dependant on a single entity?

    • Re:Correct me if I'm wrong (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Bob9113 ( 14996 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:37AM (#9518757) Homepage
      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.
    • But an F/OSS hacker has taken a company's proprietary work and made it available for free, even giving it a similar name.

      What do you mean by proprietary? Have the F/OSS coders reused someone else's code? If so, the company will have no problem at all getting an injunction to stop them, and damages. Similarly, if this is the first ever terminal server type programme, I assume the original coders have patents and will be able to license their ideas.

      Or were you just whining because some coders decided th

    • 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.

    • It's like this. People don't just use Windows because it's easy nowdays, they use it because it's easy AND all of the software that runs on it. If Linux ran all of Window's software, then there would be no reason for people to use Windows anymore, because there are user-friendly versions of Linux. Maybe of the F/OSS developers concentrated on something more along the lines of making Linux replacements for very important software, other than essential things like Open Office, The GIMP, etc. Don't get me wron

  • NoMachine (Score:2, Funny)

    by jfholcomb ( 60309 )
    LOL They got "NoMachine" now that it is a smoking pile of rubble.

  • Poor NoMachine indeed. (Score:5, Funny)

    by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @09:53AM (#9518218)
    (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.
  • For the rest of us, gnoppix [gnoppix.org] is the best bet. On a side note - what's the real benefit for gnoppix / knoppix outside of a kiosk or classroom environment?
    • It's a real easy way to get debian installed on your hard drive.

      Boot up, hit Ctrl-Alt-F2, type knx-hdinstall.
      • 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... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Data recovery. Forensics. Learning Linux without reinstalling everything every time you trash your system. Testing hardware in a store before you purchase it. Freeing up drive space by not having an OS installed. HArdly an exaustive list.

    • Re:Knoppix is great for the KDE crowd... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by BLKMGK ( 34057 ) <morejunk4me.hotmail@com> on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:08AM (#9518411) Homepage Journal
      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... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by 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 "j

    • Re:Knoppix is great for the KDE crowd... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by kfg ( 145172 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:11AM (#9518434)
      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... (Score:4, Informative)

      by ldspartan ( 14035 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:20AM (#9518562) Homepage
      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... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by IceFox ( 18179 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:42AM (#9518825) Homepage
      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

    • 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.

  • Kudos to developers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Metteyya ( 790458 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @09:53AM (#9518228)
    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?
  • First, free GPL'ed version of their chief product. Now, their server is slashdotted. Damn, what a bad day for them

  • Better than VNC through compressed ssh? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jbwiv ( 266761 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @09:54AM (#9518235)
    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? (Score:5, Informative)

      by hackel ( 10452 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:01AM (#9518337) Journal
      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? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        On the server:
        vncserver -localhost

        On the client
        ssh -L5901:localhost:5901 servername
        vncviewer localhost:1

        There you go. The server is persistent. If the ssh connection goes down, just reconnect and restart the viewer.

      • Re:Better than VNC through compressed ssh? (Score:5, Informative)

        by 4lex ( 648184 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:32AM (#9518692) Homepage Journal
        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!
        • Uhhhh.... You are using X11 over a remote ssh tunnel to "locally" view a VNC session. (i.e., VNC client and server are running on the same machine.) This is not the best use of VNC, and in fact the ONLY benefit you get from using VNC in that case is reconnectability.

      • 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.

    • 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.)

    • Because it uses protocol specific compression and caches, it's much faster than using simply ssh compression (which knows nothing about what it's carrying).

      You can read about it on the NX website.
    • As I understand it, NX probably won't give you a huge improvement over compressed ssh on a local network. The big gains come in high latency networks (e.g. internet), as the NX server can eliminate a lot of expensive and unnecessary delays due to X11 round-trips.
  • and not a real bandwidth hog so hopefully someone can illuminate why this might be better.

    • Re:TightVNC is great (Score:5, Informative)

      by cduffy ( 652 ) <charles+slashdot@dyfis.net> on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:26AM (#9518632)
      TightVNC is still horrifically slow (and somewhat bandwidth-consumptive) compared to RDP -- try them side-by-side some time.
      • not sure if you mean RDP the protocol or if there is an app called RDP, but when I use rdesktop on a local LAN connecting from a fully updated RH9 box to a Win2k server, I literally have to wrap the command line in a do ; rdesktop server ; done loop because it crashes every 2 to 5 minutes. It may be quicker but the protocol SUCKS in my experience and collapses wayyyy too frequently. My customer won't install VNC, either, which sucks since with TS you can't (deeply) admin a server anyway. Hell, some people h
        • Sounds more like a network problem. I've kept rdesktop sessions opened for days over the internet.

          While wicked slow, I also do low-level management with the compaq ILO with Advanced license that give a full remote graphical desktop via java / web browser. Very handy when the server is having problems booting.

  • Poor NoMachine ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @09:59AM (#9518311) Homepage Journal
    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 (Score:3, Funny)

    by daves ( 23318 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:03AM (#9518359) Journal
    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
  • Would someone in the know please describe NX software, and how it relates to screen, remove X sessions, and VNCs? It seems many people, (including myself), don't understand how all of these work, (or maybe have a basic understanding of each but no inter-relational understanding), or the state or remote GUI linux in general.
    • 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).
      • What do you mean not multiuser? In *nix you can open up as many XVNC servers as you want. You can have multiple user doing their own stuff in their own session. You can also have multiple users connected to one session, so you get desktop sharing.

        The only thing the NX buys is speed, and that's really true. NX is very very fast, faster than RDP5 I would say.

        If you're on a LAN, you don't even need them. You can have Citrix or Windows Terminal like services by just using X and XDMCP and XDM. That's what the
        • Sorry...I as refering to the windows version. The project I work on deals with pushing multiple Windows desktops. The only two things that work the way we want on Windows is Tarantella and Citrix. We are currently looking at using vmware ESX server to push multiple windows desktops (esx runs via a custom linux) via RDP. The whole goal is to eliminate the the need for Citrix or terminal server licenses. Windows on the desktop is a must because of software lock-in (iManage).

          Also, anyone now how to push a sin

  • NoMachines (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Qwavel ( 733416 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:07AM (#9518401)
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by CoJoNEs ( 73698 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:15AM (#9518508) Homepage
    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.

  • What is NX (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    NoMachine's NX is a thin client that is similar to VNC with Windows compatibility. They claim it works on a 9600 baud connection.

    http://www.newsforge.com/software/03/07/10/21462 47.shtml?tid=11

  • I liked it the first time... (Score:3, Funny)

    by omega9 ( 138280 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:30AM (#9518670)
    ...when it was called Citrix.
    • ... when it was called X Window System.

      I'm not sure if any multiuser graphical windows systems preceded X, I'm not old enough to remember.

      Citrix took the X foundation and added useful features like local file and printer sharing.

  • introduction to NX (Score:4, Informative)

    by zoso ( 105166 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @10:34AM (#9518713) Homepage
    There was nice article about the NX:

    http://www.orangecrate.com/article.php?sid=677
  • Is it a sad day when the papers linked to on slashdot are no more credible than the comments posted in reply to them?
  • In thier 3.4 release they had integrated wine (perhaps even before that, but they made it fairly obvious in 3.4), unfortunately it doesn't work. Even after countless configuration attempts it seems like a flawed addition to the distro.

    Its something I was looking forward to aswell...

  • "Poor NoMachine" (Score:3, Informative)

    by iantri ( 687643 ) <.iantri. .at. .gmx.net.> on Thursday June 24, 2004 @11:03AM (#9519033) Homepage
    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? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dr.Dubious DDQ ( 11968 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @11:10AM (#9519142) Homepage

    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?

  • I was reading about NX a few months ago and saw that someone is writing a NX-extension for X11 so you can just ssh to a box, set DISPLAY to something like "nx/192.168.0.1:0,port=6789,ssl=1" and run single applications using the NX protocol, MUCH MUCH faster than plain old remote X. It also enables you to "take over" an existing session. It requires that the extension is enabled on both X-servers. Unfortunatly their site is currently slashdotted so I can't find a link..

  • KDE NX? (Score:4, Informative)

    by illogic ( 52099 ) on Thursday June 24, 2004 @11:52AM (#9519676)
    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.)

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