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The Arrival of NX, Part 1 (Linux Journal)
FreeNX Development Team member Kurt Pfeifle begins a series of
articles on FreeNX, on Linux Journal. "NX is a new technology that
allows one to run remote X11 sessions across slow or low-bandwidth network
connections. User experience with NX is one of excellent responsiveness.
Users with previous remote X11 session experience are stunned by NX's speed
and its snappy application interaction. Moreover, NX also can connect to
remote RDP and VNC sessions and offer big performance wins over TightVNC
and rdesktop remote access."
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The Arrival of NX, Part 1 (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 29, 2005 17:24 UTC (Fri) by lacostej (subscriber, #2760) [Link] "Access deniedYou are not authorized to access this page."
:(
At least thanks to LWN for reporting things I don't have access to!
The Arrival of NX, Part 1 (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 29, 2005 17:53 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link] Works perfect here...
The Arrival of NX, Part 1 (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 29, 2005 19:26 UTC (Fri) by lacostej (subscriber, #2760) [Link] thanks for the feedback. It works now for me again. Not sure what happened. My history doesn't show anything special. Temporary site issue?
The Arrival of NX, Part 1 (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 29, 2005 18:07 UTC (Fri) by ris (editor, #5) [Link] The link works for me.
Not faster than VNC in my experience Posted Jul 30, 2005 6:07 UTC (Sat) by hofhansl (guest, #21652) [Link] I installed FreeNX a few weeks ago, and I found responsivenes not better than VNC over a compressed SSH tunnel. In fact VNC over compressed SSH seemed slightly faster.
Hence I don't quite understand the hype.
Much faster than VNC, RDP and X in my experience Posted Jul 30, 2005 11:50 UTC (Sat) by kobserver (guest, #30087) [Link] Unfortunately you do not specify the network conditions nor the hardwareyou used to run your tests. Could you elaborate, please? If you run it in your LAN, and if you use an "old" hardware (whose slow CPU could proof to be the bottleneck which can't keep up with the constant encryption/decryption _plus_ NX-specific compression/decompression going on), and if you use certain session settings -- then indeed the experience could be that it is not much of an improvement. You have to run it over a dialup modem, or ISDN, or DSL to feel the dramatic improvement indeed. Hence I *do* understand the hype and support it.
Much faster than VNC, RDP and X in my experience Posted Jul 30, 2005 21:08 UTC (Sat) by hofhansl (guest, #21652) [Link] I've had DSL (slow with only 192kbit) and Cable (fast 3mbit) at home and use my machine from work (about 40mi away, broadband obviously). And yes, my home machine is quite powerful, so that I do mind to run the VNC Server (which is nothing but another X server) on it.
I found the key to better responsiveness was to use SSH Compression.
So, anyway, you use the best tool for the job, no need to evangalize over it (not saying you did...). For all of my usage patterns I found VNC/SSH-Compression to be superior.
Not faster than VNC in my experience Posted Jul 30, 2005 19:25 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link] I have used NX and several flavors of VNC and my experience has been that NX consistently blows VNC out of the water. On a LAN maybe it would not be noticeable. But over any sort of WAN connection, or over a modem connection, the difference is absolutely AMAZING. Over a 512k connection, with no loss of color depth, the responsiveness is so close to that of being on the console that it's hard to tell the difference.
The Arrival of NX, Part 1 (Linux Journal) Posted Jul 30, 2005 23:37 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] since the key limitation of X is the number of round trips nessasary (especially at startup) any comparison should include looking at the work that xorg is doing. I remember seeing that they have an X extention that combines a lot of the initialization round trips to drasticly speed startup time.
NX too hard to use Posted Aug 1, 2005 17:48 UTC (Mon) by scripter (subscriber, #2654) [Link] Maybe I'm missing something, but I found NX far too difficult to setup and use a month ago. I think it can be corrected, but for now, it's difficult.
I have SSH access on every machine I want to log in to. Seems like I should be able to fire up my NX client and connect WITHOUT having to import the NX server's (separate) key. SSH caches keys for me, and already has the sever's normal SSH key. Why does NX need a second, conflicting key? There can only be one key imported at a time. I regularly connect to several separate remote machines, so this is unworkable.
Getting NX installed is also something of a pain. The NoMachine NX client on Windows uses Cygwin, but their cygwin instance (cygwin.dll) conflicts with the one that I already had on the machine. So, I uninstalled the NX windows client.
NX was fast, and it looked promising. It's the finer points of usability that made me reject it for the time being.
NX too hard to use Posted Aug 1, 2005 20:22 UTC (Mon) by kobserver (guest, #30087) [Link] "NX far too difficult to setup and use (...)"
"Why does NX need a second, conflicting key?"
"There can only be one key imported at a time. I regularly connect
to several separate remote machines, so this is unworkable."
"The NoMachine NX client on Windows uses Cygwin, but their cygwin
instance (cygwin.dll) conflicts with the one that I already had on the
machine."
NX too hard to use Posted Aug 2, 2005 19:22 UTC (Tue) by scripter (subscriber, #2654) [Link] It would be nice if NX were easy to use out-of-the-box instead of having to search the excellent knowledgebase. Indeed, that's how I found answers to several of problems previously. I'm glad the client is improving, but I think it still needs to be easier to use. I don't want to have to copy down a client key just so that I can connect. I already have a user account plus ssh, so why can't that be good enough?
As for Cygwin, I hope NoMachine is getting their enhancements merged upstream. I've customized my copy of cygwin, remapping /cygdrive/c to /c and so forth. The NX cygwin instance doesn't play well with my existing config, making my pre-existing install nearly unusable. Also, the NX Windows client doesn't work for non-admin privileged user accounts. Believe it or not, I don't run as an admin on my Windows machines.
NX too hard to use Posted Aug 12, 2005 19:41 UTC (Fri) by kobserver (guest, #30087) [Link] "I've customized my copy of cygwin, remapping /cygdrive/c to /c
and so forth."
"The NX cygwin instance doesn't play well with my existing
config,..."
"...making my pre-existing install nearly unusable."
"Also, the NX Windows client doesn't work for non-admin privileged
user accounts...."
NX too hard to use Posted Aug 13, 2005 20:06 UTC (Sat) by scripter (subscriber, #2654) [Link] One of the things I've enjoyed about reading LWN is that most people, by and large, tend to be polite and less inflammatory than in some other linux related forums. I suppose one of the risks of making comments publicly is that someone may respond and resort to character attacks rather than intelligent dialog.
In any case, I hope my comments about NX difficulties will help others to be aware of and avoid trouble. I'm also sure that NX will continue to improve over time. It's a cool project and has great potential.
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