From vnc-list Sat Mar 29 02:49:39 2003 From: Gian Filippo Pinzari Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 02:49:39 +0000 To: vnc-list Subject: NX Project Announcement X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=vnc-list&m=104890943930055 Hi all, this message was sent to RDesktop, Real VNC and Tight VNC developers' mailing lists. First of all, we want to thank Matthew Chapman, Const Kaplinsky and all the RDesktop and VNC developers for their fantastic work on which part of NX software is based. Without their software not only NX would not have been the same product, but all the Linux world would have miss something. A similar announcement was sent to LTSP, KDE and GNOME mailing lists. We invite everybody in these lists to check our project at: http://www.nomachine.com We understand that NX can be intended as an alternative to VNC and, in some regards, RDesktop, but we strongly believe that close cooperation between RDesktop, VNC and our project can only benefit the developers and all the Linux community. NX is a commercial product and some parts are closed source, nevertheless all the core technology on which NX is based is and will remain OpenSource. This includes very, very good compression of X protocol that is the result of 3 years of hard development (I know it was hard, as I'm one of those who did it ;-). Beside software developed by NoMachine to handle X sessions, we integrated in the same infrastructure seamless access to RDP and RFB sessions through integration with your RDesktop and VNC projects. All the modifications we made to rdesktop and vncviewer are available here: http://www.nomachine.com/dev_sources.php We didn't add functionalities but dedicated our effort to greatly improve the speed over low-bandwidth networks by adding NX's X compressed transport. Both rdesktop and vncviewer became server side gateways. They "speak" RDP and RFB at NX server side and X protocol from server to client. I understand it's difficult to believe, but it works. RFB and RDP NX sessions can run between 2 and 10 times better than with native clients over low bandwidth links. Some early documents, among them an introduction to NX design goals, can be found here: http://www.nomachine.com/documentation.php There was a small thread in XFree86 forum these days were some technical issues about X as a remote computing platform and NX in particular were discussed. You can find it at: http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/forum/2003-March/000629.html NoMachine provides a TestDrive server where you can freely connect and run as many KDE and GNOME sessions as you like. We think we have done a good job, but we want to hear from the real experts. Download the client from here: http://www.nomachine.com/download.php then get a user id and password from: http://www.nomachine.com/testdrive.php At the moment the test account never expires, so you can use it to compare performances in different network conditions. Even if you don't care about X compression, consider that NX includes everything is needed to make a MS Windows computer a X terminal, so you can do with it something useful :-). A last word about NX commercial software. As we said, all the core components (and especially the X related components) are OSS and released ad GPL. This means that everything the NX client and server do, can be done by hand by a normal user having an account on the remote server. We aim at the lazy users :-). NoMachine intends to provide the higher level software and the administrative tools that make possible to run thousands of users' sessions. We aim at the same customers of Citrix MetaFrame and SCO Tarantella. In the future, we envision a world where any application is available to any device, from anywhere in the world through any remote computing protocol. To make this possible we needed efficient transport and compression of X-Window. Now it is there and everybody can use it. /Gian Filippo Pinzari. _______________________________________________ VNC-List mailing list VNC-List@realvnc.com http://www.realvnc.com/mailman/listinfo/vnc-list