LCA: The X-men speak [LWN.net]

LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 12, 2013 11:39 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

NX certainly provides screen-like access to remote servers (i.e. I turn off the local computer in the evening, turn in back on the next morning, reconnect and I get all my windows back in the same state) and in my experience it is surprisingly effective even on connections to servers thousand kilometres away. However, as far as I know, this has not much to do with the GPUs and I have no idea how much this depends on X servers.

LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 12, 2013 23:09 UTC (Tue) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link]

NX does not depend on any sort of hacked X server, unless it is doing so under the covers, a la Xnest, which it may be doing.

I use OpenNX on Linux and Mac, and it has the best performance I have ever seen for remote application usage. What used to take 3 minutes over coffee shop wi-fi goes down to like 5 seconds with NX.

A great pity that it has gone proprietary for the latest version.

LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 13, 2013 1:26 UTC (Wed) by dtlin (✭ supporter ✭, #36537) [Link]

NX does not depend on any sort of hacked X server, unless it is doing so under the covers, a la Xnest, which it may be doing.

It absolutely is. nxagent is a fork of Xnest, although I'm not quite sure what version.

LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 21, 2013 11:06 UTC (Thu) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

" A great pity that it has gone proprietary for the latest version. "

NX started as proprietary... yet
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8477?page=0,1
"In these various messages, Gian hinted at the commercial NoMachine NX Server product. The features he outlined sounded exciting enough, but it was another message I took from his postings that thrilled me the most. It was how he outlined that NoMachine had released its main intellectual property, the core NoMachine NX libraries, under the *GPL license*. He wrote, "It is there and everybody can use it."
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So the mechanism (protocol addition) is free... still is... but blindness has a price... why maintain a free version when there is no "support"... i would do the same, improvements only on the proprietary "version"...

And the funny thing is that NX seems to address many of the issues that were discuss about wayland... most could be used not only on the context of remote display, but local also...

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8477?page=0,2
NX combines three essential ingredients:

* an efficient compression of what normally would be X traffic

* an intelligent mechanism to store and re-use (cache) data that is transfered between server and client

* a drastic reduction in multiple, time-consuming X roundtrips, bringing their total number *close to zero*.
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(there goes the walala hype down the drain)

So it seems clear to me its not a copy or derivative of Xnest.. at all..

And i couldn't think of a better addition to the all X protocol than this... but sometimes wonder if Xorg has any say, or only does what its told to do, and that is why it has been "striped" and now positioned to be "finished"... hope the distros could take a serious look at this situation and take over, hire a "Ninja" or two, fresh ideas, specially the desktop oriented ones... their future is in jeopardy.