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Poor NoMachine... now they don't have a product

From TFA:
"There is a free implementation of an NX server based on NoMachine's libraries named FreeNX, but this did not appeal to Google.

"FreeNX's primary target is to replace the one closed component and is written in a mix of several thousand lines of Bash, Expect and C, making FreeNX difficult to maintain," according to Google.

Neatx is written in Python, with a few wrapper scripts in Bash and one program written in C "for performance reasons". "

It was unmaintainable because it was written in Bash, Expect, and C, so they rewrote it in Bash, Python, and C?

It might be worth mentioning to some people who are no doubt confused; there is a difference between FreeNX and NX Free. And on a futher side note, I have tried installing FreeNX two or three times and the packages seemed to be unavailable from distro repo or even from the berlios FS (Weird!). In any case if this Google NX server isn't a piece of junk I will be over the moon!

In my opinion NX is #1 remote display (also sound and printing) technology there is. You get a great quality image over a very slow DSL connection! VNC doesn't come anywhere near it - and for the $0 price tag you can't beat it!

The trouble with NX Free is that it can only allow a few simultaneous connections at a time - I'm hoping Google's server changes this.

This is excellent news, I've really enjoyed using NX but always found it slightly temperamental to use. Still, it gave me high performance rootless application access over a dodgy wifi link in Germany, back to my machine at uni in the UK - with the ability to resume every time the wifi dropped. I've known people have trouble resuming dropped sessions, though it worked when I needed it. Anything which is well-supported and makes NX nicer to work with is very welcome - I hope Google press on with making this better and better. It's be real nice if they'd make an open source client available too, preferably with a choice of front-end widget libraries ;-)

Another project, which I actually head about on Slashdot and am very impressed by is Xpra: http://partiwm.org/wiki/xpra [partiwm.org]

Xpra = X Persistent Remote Applications, i.e. connect to your xpra server (tunnels through ssh by default) to get rootless applications delivered to your desktop, disconnect and reconnect somewhere else and get the same apps back. Like screen, for X. It's not meant for fast-changing displays, e.g. video. But it's a nice, compact approach that largely consists of a few thousand lines of Python. It uses modern X extensions cunningly to get the job done without having to understand most of the X protocol itself. And, somewhat like NX, it's better suited to high latency links than simple X11 protocol is. These days I think Xpra is starting to get more advanced features such as Windows client support, theme matching for remote and local apps, some clipboard sharing, etc. It's a nice little app that has its uses, particularly if you want something simpler than NX to set up and administer. The server can also be easily run by an unprivileged user whereas I'm not sure if that's the case for NX (?).

I'm a VNC user, but I realize some of the benefits of NX. (Sound...performance...etc.)

However...I couldn't get past the start-up times. With VNC, I'd 'click' and poof, my applications would be right were I left them, continuing on as if I'd never left. If I closed the window, the applications didn't even know I was gone.

With NX, I'd connect, I'd go through a big start-up process, I'd log in, and wait for my windows to open.... If I wanted to leave, I'd click on the 'I'm leaving now' and it would put everything into a state to where I could come back to it, etc etc. (granted my remote machine was no speed demon.)

So, finally I went back to VNC. I tend to have the window go up and down quite frequently, and the startup/shutdown times of NX were just a deal breaker.

If I was going to use it as more of a truly 'remote terminal' when I'd have it up for hours at a time, then perhaps the heavily loaded ends wouldn't bother me.

Let us not forget that FreeNX and NX in general appears to use SSH as it's only needed port allowing not only normal SSH terminal activity but also NX connectivity using only 1 port with default SSH encrypted packets so they cannot easily reconstruct the transmitted data in the event of an interception.

So first, this still requires nomachines nx core, seems like, so it cannot claim to be completely pure.

Secondly, though they don't use Tcl expect, they are still doing the same exact thing, but in python. The problem here is when writing expect stuff, you are already in a bad spot as unexpected input comes up. For example, in trying neatx, I already noted their expect code wasn't expecting a password prompt common in a kerberos environment. And when things go off-the-rails in an expect context, you return to the client an extremely unhelpful, obscure error.

Thirdly, it is all trying to interoperate with NX's rather unfortunate mode of operation where the service is accessed via ssh to another user, even though the goal is just to 'su' to the user you want to be. Considering nx requires you ta have a normal *nix account anyway, I don't get why they implemented this goofy nx user.

NX has long been a source of some frustration to me. FreeNX has been promising, but subject to all sorts of weirdness (sessions suspended being lost because they go to closed, suspneded sessions that cannot be resumed for unknown reasons, etc). I really really want the technology NX has to offer, but all the implementations I've tried thusfar have design decisions that are unfortunate and implementations with mysterious bugs and a user community that is unfortunately weak.

Almost all of this is the fault of the code at the NeatX/FreeNX layer rather than the core. But given the inherently goofy design they are having to emulate, I can't blame them. I would *LOVE* to see an implementation throw out Nomachine's architecture and do a more sane, per user scheme.