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List:       vnc-list
Subject:    NX Project Announcement
From:       Gian Filippo Pinzari <pinzari () nomachine ! com>
Date:       2003-03-29 2:49:39
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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.
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