Ubuntu Desktop In the Cloud

jimjimovich writes "One new feature in Ubuntu 10.04 that caught my attention is the Desktop in the Cloud project. Ubuntu already has great EC2 support, and it's getting even better. Now you can launch Ubuntu Desktop instances on EC2 and connect to them with an NX client."

Let's Open-Source the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Then we can run our own cloud and connect to it from wherever we want. There's a snowball's chance in hell I'm going to run my desktop on hardware that is out of my control, but for local applications, that might be interesting.

NX is a bitch: use XRDP instead

[lkcl]

whenever attempting to get FreeNX working, i've found it to be a total bitch, client-side as well as server-side. by contrast, rdesktop or any other RDP client, client-side and xrdp server-side (which is purely a matter of apt-get install xrdp on debian-based distributions) is so simple to install that a monkey could do it. demo of a monkey (myself) doing exactly that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbsydsar5Pk [youtube.com]

i never saw the point of cloud desktops

[alen]

hardware is dirt cheap and getting cheaper. you can buy a powerful server for cheap as well. but after you buy the Citrix or whatever licenses, a few more servers for redundancy, a ton of storage at enterprise prices, the enterprise hardware support, increase network bandwidth etc the savings vanish and it's cheaper to just buy regular desktop machines.

same thing with EC2. by the time you put in the network hardware and new circuits and pay Amazon for 24x7 instances it's cheaper to just buy desktops. i'm typing this on a 5 year old HP that runs windows 7 just fine.

i bet all this cloud nonsense is enterprise hardware companies trying to push higher margin products and no real trend that anyone is doing. the numbers just don't work out

Re:Cost prohibitive?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The more interesting use case is probably to be found when you combine the existence of this project with the existence of Eucalyptus [eucalyptus.com] which somebody mentioned above. The fact that it works with EC2 is interesting; but paying Amazon is likely not cost effective(since demand for desktop seats tends not to fluctuate nearly as fast as some server loads do and is, in any case, constrained by the number of NX capable thin clients available) a service where you pay extra for the elasticity isn't obviously sensible.

WIth Eucalyptus, though, you can fairly easily run your own setup, keeping the bandwidth in house and thus cheap and abundant, easily spawning a desktop instance that is available to a given user across multiple machines, thin or fat, in your organization. Because of Linux's unixy legacy, which tends to make multi-user systems a good bit easier and more natural, this isn't as compelling as it is with Windows setups; but there are still purposes for which it could be nice.