NX Compression Technology To Go Closed Source 286
An anonymous reader writes "NoMachine has sneakily revealed it is closing its source of the NX compression technology with NX 4.0: 'This release marks an important milestone in the history of the company. Version 4.0 of the software, in fact, will be only available under a closed source license.'"
Sneakily revealed? (Score:5, Funny)
"NoMachine has sneakily revealed..."
That's quite remarkable.
Re:Sneakily revealed? (Score:5, Funny)
It would appear they've achieved the impossible.
Congrats NoMachine! No matter how often I try to sneakily reveal something, I'm either too sneaky and nothing is revealed, or its revealed and not very sneaky at all!
Buried in tl;dr (Score:2)
It would appear they've achieved the impossible.
Not impossible. To me, "sneakily reveal" sounds like "bury in a tl;dr changelog".
Re:Buried in tl;dr (Score:5, Funny)
The problem with trying to hide something in a tl;dr changelog is that Someone - somewhere - WILL read the change log, and likely make mention of anything out of the ordinary on their blog.
In fact - I went to renew my Xbox live Gold membership a month ago or so... And they said that the terms and conditions of the service had changed since I last was on Gold. So I decided I would read through them. However - to continue this anecdote and help explain why it might be remotely funny - is that I had previously set my regional settings of my Xbox to Spain, and language to Spanish - so that when I got achievements in Halo 3 they came up as a different language. It's true, you can go and change it to like, Korean, then get some achievements, and no matter what language you go from there on out - they will come up in whatever language you achieved them in. I did this for a while, finding it to be of great amusement when someone new came over to my house and just happened to look at which achievements I had.
Anyways, so this ended up backfiring on me because the EULA and TOC of Live was now in Spanish, but I thought perhaps there was English at the bottom. However, there is no fast scroll when looking at the TOC - its very slow and you have to hold the analog stick down. To my dismay, there wasn't English. Afraid that going next would Mean I accepted to terms I didn't actually agree too - I quickly pulled up my computer and typed it in verbatim the entire thing into Google Translator.
If you've ever tried reading legalese in a language you do not understand - I highly recommend you NEVER EVER try it. Even after going through an internet translator you still will have no idea what the heck they are saying.
In hindsight I probably just should have not accepted the terms, gone and changed my language settings, and then gone through it - but I guess that seems obvious now, it didn't back then.
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I was about to say something snarky and suggest you should have read it online, except that it seems pretty difficult to find. I haven't found it yet. Maybe you can't read it unless you are on the XBox, which would be rather bothersome?
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Really? I stopped my service online. Maybe you just have to log into their service with a web browser? Did you try that?
Re:Buried in tl;dr (Score:4, Interesting)
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Also this [xbox.com]:
And if you follow the link on "contact XBox Support," the only way listed is to call.
I'm surprised anybody would bother to start making insults without bothering to simply supply a link. (Then again we are talking
Re:Buried in tl;dr (Score:5, Funny)
Anyways, so this ended up backfiring on me because the EULA and TOC of Live was now in Spanish,
Nobody expects the Spanish interpretation!
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Our chief weapon is surprise. Surprise and fear... Our two weapons are fear and surprise... and horrible machine-language interpretation. Amongst our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.
Re:Buried in tl;dr (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I thought exactly the same thing as the grandparent - "sneakily revealed" is a fairly remarkable statement.
The link is "http://www.nomachine.com/news-read.php?idnews=331", so it would appear that it's on a regular news portion of their site - hardly sneaky. Furthermore, it's mentioned in the very first paragraph.
Rome, Italy, December 21, 2010 - NoMachine, a global leader in cross platform remote access and application delivery solutions, announced a software preview of its upcoming new products and technologies which offer a completely redesigned client GUI and restructure its flagship suite of NX Server. The new products will not only extend the current functionalities of NX application delivery and remote access products, there will also be new naming conventions adopted. This release marks an important milestone in the history of the company. Version 4 of the software, in fact, will be only available under a closed source license.
Beats me how they're being sneaky about doing it, at any rate. Shall we agree that the summary is (shock, stunner, surprise!) badly written, or at least very biased, and go on to debating the impact of the move?
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Unloose the villagers with their digital pitchforks and torches!!!
Re:Sneakily revealed? (Score:4, Funny)
It would appear they've achieved the impossible.
It's part of their new NX 4.0 implementation - they have other forms of encryption likes AES and 3DES but Sneaky Reveal is their own proprietary encryption algorithm.
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Hmm... "proprietary encryption"?
http://www.interhack.net/people/cmcurtin/snake-oil-faq.html [interhack.net]
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Hmm... 'Hmm... "proprietary encryption"?'?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke [wikipedia.org]
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"Sneaky Reveal" is also apparently a part of their new lingerie line. The part for playful adults.
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Indeed! I thought nothing could be seen in a NoRoo...
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
The more reason to use something else. (Score:2)
VNC or reverse engineer an open alternative.
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There's no need to reverse engineer anything. Version 3 is there, and no one is going to give a damn about 4.
Anyone who feels the open version lacks something is free to extend it on their own. If not... well... it's not going to stop working outright, and at least security bugs will be fixed in a timely manner.
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Version 3 is in fact very good, but not perfect. It seems to have problems if the client is on a system with multiple monitors. Also, I have seen crashes when I full-screen SOC-Encounter. An update/bug fix would be very welcome.
This product is simply the BEST remote software for *NIX systems, period. VNC (all flavors) runs like an absolute dog compared to NX and, depending on the program, it as times completely unusable, while NX is generally very smooth.
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Version 3 has one fatal flaw. It requires password authentication, and cannot do public key authn. If version 4 addresses this, I'd pay for it.
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You can use PK authentication for the SSH traffic(for example if you want to thwart bruteforce attempts by allowing ONLY PK authentication) but the NX login requires a password regardless, I assume for security measures; I personally am cool with that.
Re:The more reason to use something else. (Score:5, Informative)
Ouch. Getting your password transferred to & used at arbitrary locations is hardly more secure than the challenge/response PK schema in which your secrets never leave your computer.
IMO the reasons behind this are merely laziness/incompetence on top of bad design.
I am not. First of all it is un-secure to enter your password somewhere without really having control of where it goes.
Second, it is a pain in the ass. Even if you use PK for all your ssh access you will have to maintain a password just for nx sake. Come on in the year 2010 (or 2011 for that matter) it is totally idiotic to use ssh with passwords for normal daily jobs.
That's why NX made its way out of my door very shortly after trying it out.
If you want to know the whole story then read on.
What really happens with NX is that your client first opens a ssh session to nx@server - this session uses PK auth. Unfortunately the private key is well known, as it ships with a default one and almost noone bothers with replacing it (in fact it is not advised - lol). That means anyone in the world can open that connection to your server and get authenticated and proceed to step 2.
Coming to step 2 after logging to your server as user nx the nx server program is launched. This program actually manages translating the X window protocol to the nx protocol - all the "compression" and stuff. It will set up a DISPLAY variable to point to itself and then launches ANOTHER ssh to you@localhost (localhost being the server). That's where your password comes in.
After that X applications (usually the whole desktop) can be launched under your account, they are going to talk to the sshd spawned by ssh @localhost, where the X protocol is encrypted and compressed, shortly afterwards decompressed and decrypted by the nx server running the ssh command, then translated to nx protocol, encrypted and compressed again through the ssh session for user nx all the way to your client pc where finally decrypted, decompressed, translated to X and displayed on your screen.
As you can see the weird part here is the user nx running the nx server. It is technically absolutely possible to avoid at all this step. The nx server could be easily launched on behalf of the user with the applications spawned from there. IIRC the introduction of the nx account is something as ill as licensing.
Even with the nx account present it is totally irresponsible to leave it protected by well known PK, for the sake of making the installation & deployment 2 clicks easier. The impact is that anyone can launch a nx server on your server. They claim it is secure - hah. At the very least you can start brute forcing passwords for local users, at the other extreme you can find a neat hole to hijack the process and make your way in to the system. Combine with the knowledge of some kernel loophole and you can start scanning for nx enabled systems all over the internet with satisfaction guaranteed.
And even with the ssh@localhost weirdness it is feasible to use PK auth, either by use of ssh agent or some sort of channel forwarding. But no, that's not supported, because...
... enter the customized ssh client shipped with nx which one of the steps involves. Being customized it is never kept up to date so say goodbye to features and say welcome another lot of security holes.
And finally when I read the forums about the open source client wondering if all this mess was fixed at last, I found out that it wasn't/won't - for COMPATIBILITY reasons.
Sad story.
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Right, I've used NX over a WAN link (albeit a very fast one) and it's able to handle non-intensive tasks like running Eclipse or general GNOME apps on a 2560x1600 display with reasonable performance. You can forget trying to do much of anything at that resolution with VNC over a WAN.
That said, NX totally dies if you try to do anything with animation or video. Protocols like PCoIP or HP RGS do a lot better here since they compress more.
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The problem simply is X itself, the protocol is in a serious need for an overhaul, maybe now that things are moving towards wayland and push the X protocol on top of the rendering stack than being the base of everything as huge big X server blob will get things moving. Making Cairo remote seems like a sane choice and has been done as websocket demonstration already.
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I've never used NX because it always seemed almost insurmountable to do it "free". There was free NX available, but from everything I read, it was much more difficult to set up, and I never had the time to go through it all. Add to that the fact that it seemed necessary to pick up "freely available" parts from NoMachine. I work for a company that's very picky about licenses, and knowing that an attorney's reflexive answer is "NO!" I just stick to known-good licenses like GPL, BSD, and other things I know
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Why bother? The NX compression tech prior to this release is GPLed.
You don't NEED to reverse engineer anything. Just re-name it and take it down the way.
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Except VNC lets you control a Windows/Unix/Mac machine from a Windows/Unix/Mac machine just fine. Unlike NX.
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VNC only offers a low form of control compared to what I get out of NX(IIRC, I never could get VNC to recognize more than 3 buttons on my mouse but I need the use of all 5), or rdesktop for that matter, and you don't need any special ports open, just SSH. And to top it off, NX offers better compression which is why they're likely closing the source. I have tried to convince NoMachine to make a Windows version but apparently they don't care about it despite my offers of wealth.
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Caveman!
I couldn't possibly get any work done without my 18 button mouse. Standard tasks are ridiculously inefficient on anything less.
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Well, yeah, I have several friends who need at least 9 buttons...I'm just a bit of a simpleton in some regards.
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Just put the mouse electronics on the bottom of a keyboard and enjoy your new 102-button two-handed mouse.
Re:The more reason to use something else. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never seen NX perform as well as VNC - espescially Turbo/Tiger VNC with VirtualGL.
If you're doing remote 3D/scientific visualization, Turbo/Tiger VNC and VirtualGL is far and away better than NX. I've gotten 20 fps for 1280x1024 3D graphics -- over a 2 Mbit connection. VirtualGL/TurboVNC can also handle clusters of GPU's (ie. many nodes, each rendering part of an extremely complex image). The final screen buffer is then tunneled over SSH. It's amazing, frankly, to have some-odd 16 or so GPU's rendering a hellaciously complex 3D scene, and then it gets sent over a tiny pipe using TurboVNC & VirtualGL, and is then displayed on a netbook with very usable frame rates.
I didn't believe it was possible until I tried it myself. Recall you can stream a movie at close to DVD quality at 2 MBit; so I guess it's not that unbelieveable after all.
NX, in comparison, couldn't even start glxgears.
you don't need any special ports open, just SSH
SSH is all you need for anything. It's port forwarding and tunneling capabilities can be used for anything that uses TCP/IP - NFS, VNC, Samba, HTTP, video games - anything.
NX does the same thing - it uses SSH port forwarding & tunneling; it just handles it transparently for the user.
This is hardly unique to NX, as many VNC implementations also uses SSH transparently for the user.
And it's been pointed out - there isn't a major platform that VNC doesn't support.
Re:The more reason to use something else. (Score:5, Informative)
I've gotten 20 fps for 1280x1024 3D graphics -- over a 2 Mbit connection.
On the other hand for usable browsing and general desktop sessions NX doesn't need close to 2Mbit, it works well for me at 56kbit. So it's horses for courses, I guess.
It's not the VNC protocol that gives you your good 3D performance, it's the architecture of VirtualGL. I don't think there's a good reason VirtualGL couldn't be made to work with NX as well as VNC.
The future probably belongs to SPICE [redhat.com], which redhat (a company who do know how to develop open source code) are creating for remote access to virtualised systems.
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I would love to see a better format for screen sharing, but if it doesn't work with everything, it will have a hard time replacing VNC.
New? (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps I don't remember it right, but in my recollection, NoMachine has always been a bit possessive with their (definitely impressive) technology. To the point that lesser alternatives have continued to be used and even developed.
Re:New? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, they previously opened under an "open source it but make the open-source version a pain-in-the-ass to use" business model. You got a random code dump that wasn't even buildable. However, there was code there, and it was possible to fix it up, which is what the FreeNX and OpenNX projects did (along with adding a few things). With no GPL release of the core libraries, it's no longer possible to even use it as a base for a cleaned-up open-source release--- either projects will have to independently develop a fork of the previous version, or come up with something else.
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Presumably, the success of FreeNX and the advent of OpenNX is what pushed them over the edge -- the "code dump that no one can use hahaha" model wasn't working for them.
Re:New? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm hoping this will be the impetus for the forks to abandon all pretense of interoperability with NoMachine's crap session management and do it right.
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Indeed. It's like they *want* people to not use it.
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Yes, they want people to use VNC, like any normal person would do. What they really want is people to depend on their product, then lock them in with a new version that is paid, but that ain't gonna happen. VNC is just fine, and X11 is free, plus every company I've ever worked for wanted to buy my Hummingbird, so why would I even bother with NoMachine? The only admin who ever recommended it to me was of the Windows side of the house, and I'm not buying. So long, and thanks for all the fish!
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NoMachine has always been a bit possessive with their (definitely impressive) technology.
To be fair, it's not like NX appeared from nowhere: it's a fork from DXPC.
violating software patents? (Score:2, Interesting)
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The patents would most likely be related to speed, rather than compression ratio. For instance, all the good (fast) arithmetic encoders are still under patent. These trade a small bit of compression efficiency to avoid the expensive division per symbol that is otherwise required.
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there is a fixed and easily definable limit to the amount of lossless compression a dataset can withstand.
Um. Okay. How many bits are there in the optimal coding for this post?
Turns out it isn't *that* easy to define.
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uh... optimal is NOT subjective at all.
Wrong, douche bag.
There are at least 4 metrics in the case of data compression that can be optimized for, and further that any metric can have a weighted level of importance:
1) Compression ratio.
2) Speed of compression.
3) Memory Overhead (the good compressors use a LOT of memory.. one compression competition limits memory use to "only" 1 gigabyte)
4) Recovery rate from corruption/transmission errors.
You are obviously one of those compression noobs that talks the big talk but doesnt have any applied
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Or performance on the input type. Sure lossless compression cares less what it operates on, but you can still have algorithms which make more sense for different types of input. As a trivial example, if the input to your compressor is one of five GB-long sequences known in advance, you can compress that down to 3 bits.
Re:violating software patents? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the antecedents of NX was a thing called "dxpc", which I used to use. It did compression, but more performance came from simply being a proxy and short-circuiting many of the round-trip communications X did. X is a very chatty protocol, and much of that chatter can be intelligently done away with. That's one of the things that dxpc, and now NX did.
A year or two back I found dxpc source, dusted it off, and it actually built cleanly. But it didn't work worth spit. I guess X has moved on.
Re:violating software patents? (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed, usually, the slowness in X is caused by network latency (the exception being if you are rendering a lot of pixels, e.g. for movies). Moreover, the slowness is often not inherent in the X protocol, but rather caused by how an application uses it. Some X clients are amazingly fast, even over moderate latency links.
This is also why you often get a more responsive UI by using something that just pushes pixel data, like VNC, instead of X. They work faster, even though they are less efficient in terms of amount of network traffic. It's not the throughput, it's the latency.
You could actually do the same thing with X: just render your whole app to an XImage, then render that to the server. This will be faster than synchronously performing all your drawing operations over the network, if you do lots of drawing operations. On the other hand, if you have lots of images that you tend to reuse, store them on the server as XPixmaps, and then you can render them faster than you could by pushing the pixels each time. X offers you this choice, and when used well, can actually be _faster_ than other technologies over any kind of network. The only thing I haven't found is a way to compress pixel data, but perhaps that is just because I haven't looked hard enough.
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Who shit in your cereal this morning? Nice job on the personal attacks.
Re:violating software patents? (Score:4, Informative)
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So what (Score:2)
Someone will come along and make a better opensource alternative to it.
Re:So what (Score:5, Insightful)
And nobody had created anything as good as BitKeeper either until there was suddenly a need for someone to do so when the free license was pulled.
Of course that person that came along was Linus Torvolds, not your typical hack.
Linus himself says Git is not as good as BitKeeper (Score:2)
Linus himself says Git is not as good as BitKeeper.
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[citation needed]
Linus : "I'm an egotistical bastard"
Imagining Linus actually admitting that something was better than something he wrote is hard. git soundly beats BitKeeper in terms of performance ; BK was managing a kernel patch merge in 6 seconds at a time that git was managing 6 patches per second. Squishy-feeling UI considerations don't sound like Linus' bag, and he wrote git specifically to cater to his needs, so I'm struggling to grasp what he would consider "better" about BitKeeper over git.
He thought BitKeeper was better than all th
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Re:So what (Score:4, Funny)
slashdot is dead when there are 2 misspellings of Linus' last name in the same thread and nobody corrects it
NX is a bandaid (Score:4, Insightful)
Rather than bitch about how they're making it closed source, or dismissing the gesture entirely, maybe this should be taken as a sign that the problem NX solves needs a different solution. Like, oh I don't know... maybe revising the X windows protocol so it doesn't suck so hard it has its own event horizon?
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Unless I'm missing something, Wayland isn't network transparent like X is. Wayland's advantage is that it's simpler than X, so it has higher performance. For those needing network transparency, X can be run on top of Wayland, but then you're still stuck with X's obsolete protocol, rendering it not very useful on slower network connections.
Re:NX is a bandaid (Score:5, Interesting)
It should be possible to make Wayland "network transparent". This would be the job of the "compositor". The Compositor takes the window images and assembles them into the screen display, and also takes user interface events and sends them to the programs. There is no reason it cannot assemble a window onto a remote display by talking to the Compositor running there, and return input events from that remote display. It can take hints about what areas of the windows were updated and doing comparisons and data compression so the images are sent quickly.
This is how Microsoft does remove windowing and it works reasonably well. Also how VNC works though they don't have access to the low levels similar to the Compositor.
Re:NX is a bandaid (Score:5, Insightful)
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X can be run on top of Wayland, but then you're still stuck with X's obsolete protocol,
Once again, wayland does not do a third of what X does, I repeat, wayland is NOT a suitable replacement for x, it does not handle window creation or mouse events or anything (which is what x11 is mostly used for these days)
Wayland is still useful as a screen multiplexer etc. But it does not do what most people think it does, hell read it's website with it's goals.
It is far simpler because it doesn't have anywhere near the scope of X, by itself it is useless. This is why x is still needed.
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It's true that Wayland doesn't do everything that X does, but it does do some of the hardest parts, which mean that somebody might think about writing a replacement and not be called a nutter.
In fact it's what they're currently aming for: making GUIs for resource constrained environments where X is just overkill (like tablets and netbooks).
Combine that with years of experience with X and things like RDP and VNC and there are people who are saying we could build network transparancy on top of Wayland without
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As we move back to distributed environments (cloud is the new buzzword for that), things like X will become more important.
Missing explanatory link in summary (Score:5, Informative)
Here is an explanation of what NX compression technology is [wikipedia.org].
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Who's had sucess? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who's had sucess? (Score:5, Informative)
SSH lives on as Tectia and still has quite the revenue stream selling to companies that presume it's more secure because they have to pay for it. Commercial SSH has always just pretty much been for suckers and continues to be, the open source aspect being pretty well a moot point.
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Commercial SSH has always just pretty much been for suckers
By "always", did you mean even before there was PuTTY or another decent free SSH client for Windows? Or did you mean Windows itself is for suckers?
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What about SAINT? (An honest question, I don't know how well they're doing.)
Part of it was good... (Score:2)
Specifically, the core tech isn't too shabby. Their session management stuff with awkward use of ssh keys and a separate user on top of the user's real account, a real awkward mess. I use a complete separate management of nxagent/nxproxy that doesn't use any extraneous user and it's nice.
The real shame is their strategy seemed to be oriented around selling their crappy session management stuff and giving away the quality stuff.
Er... (Score:5, Informative)
The reason that the "core" bits of NX were always Free is because dxpc (and, thus, mlview-dxpc, from which NX sprang) is only available under the GPL.
If i was involved in dxpc (or mlview-dxpc, really, although I'd imagine most of those changes are owned by the NX folks) development I'd be lawyering up at this point, if only to get some kind of proof that I wasn't being ripped off.
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If i was involved in dxpc (or mlview-dxpc, really, although I'd imagine most of those changes are owned by the NX folks) development I'd be lawyering up at this point, if only to get some kind of proof that I wasn't being ripped off.
NoMachine's defense might be to claim a ground-up rewrite of the parts of the program demonstrably derived from dxpc, just as the LAME team wrote replacements for ISO's MP3 encoder demonstration code piece by piece. How would your lawyer talk a judge into authorizing a fishing expedition to see whether this is the case?
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Actually I assume they now closed it up because they have removed the last trace of the old GPL core.
I am an NX user (Score:2)
There is nothing software based on the market right now which comes close to offering what NX has. Nothing. X, VNC and Spice all have their drawbacks and it boils down to how they behave with limited bandwidth and high latency. With NX, our engineers can actually be productive in an NX session. While I am philosophically opposed to them closing the source for version 4 and not sharing, the pragmatist in me is thinking "hey, built in web server, cool, that'll make it easier for me to allocate VMs to the engi
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Try as I might, I simply could not get this "whatever-it-is" software to work, and I know something about getting "whatever-it-is" software to work.
Nothing of value is lost here.
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Your kidding I hope.
On my CentOS box it entailed the following gruelling sequence of steps:
$ sudo yum install nx freenx
Then, install a client, connect to your server, pretend you are working on your server.
This is useless for the runlevel 3 crowd (however my box is at 3 and it runs quite nicely).
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Your kidding I hope.
On my CentOS box it entailed the following gruelling sequence of steps:
$ sudo yum install nx freenx
Then, install a client, connect to your server, pretend you are working on your server.
This is useless for the runlevel 3 crowd (however my box is at 3 and it runs quite nicely).
Yea, installing the software isn't very hard. Configuring it and getting the client etc to play nice is where it gets not so fun.
Even so - you can blame RedHat (or whoever maintains that package) for making your package so nice and easy. Not everyone has that indirect expert assistance handy.
Re:Fast remote X connection... (Score:5, Informative)
I am a real CLI addict, but some things still require a GUI.
For example comparing a server's /etc tree with another one, and applying changes.I found Meld to be great for that. But to be able to effectively run Meld on an otherwise headless remote server, connected through a slow ADSL link, I need NX.
Plain X forwarding is fine on a LAN, but it's not really usable over ADSL.
Re:Fast remote X connection... (Score:4, Insightful)
For example comparing a server's /etc tree with another one, and applying changes.
Ever consider "diff" and "patch"? Seriously....
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I've given NX too many chances as it is. I kept giving it "one more try", but I decided to call it quits before this announcement.
I've always found VNC to be a better option - espescially after working with TurboVNC and its successor, TigerVNC in concert with VirtualGL.
Being able to get astonishingly high frame rates (15-20 fps) at high resolution with 3D rendered graphics over a 1.5 MB connection is an impressive feat - one which I can't duplicate using NX.
VNC lets you control the connection security - me
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Maybe ssh X11 forwarding with compression would help?
What I have done to get X over ssh to work acceptably over dsl.
Set a simple theme for gtk and qt apps. Having images as the background for menu items seems to slow things down.
In addition to enabling compression, make sure that ssh is configured so that CompressionLevel is 9 instead of the default of 6.
Finally, if I am running a windowmanager remotely blackbox (and its offspring) are really light on network resources.
I have not had to do anything else to get things working acceptably.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Ha!
In practice, NX doesn't provide more than PuTTy and XMing.
But is is impressive software.
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There is one crucial difference - it's a hell of a lot faster than X over SSH.
Re:NX significantly better (Score:2)
But better enough to pay for it? Most will say that its not. Some will.
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Wouldn't remote X11 over BZ stream cut it similarly?
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Not sure why you'd think that. There are a lot of people who want to do remote X (more remote than LAN), and NX currently seems to be the best, most convenient tool for that job.
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The performance of VNC over even "normal" broadband connections can be abysmal. NX runs rings around it for performance.
Re:Nobody gives a shit. (Score:5, Interesting)
VNC opens a window that everything else goes in.
Running shit via "ssh -X [-Y]" makes anything I run integrate seamlessly into my environment.
Big difference, that.
Re:Nobody gives a shit. (Score:5, Informative)
I was just using NX last night to connect to my Linux work machine from home. I've used VNC but my experience is that NX is much faster over my internet connection (20/8) than VNC was over a LAN, and this is running NX on Windows in a VM on my Linux box (because I've had some issues with the VPN in Linux).
NX is a lot more intelligent than VNC in that it caches a lot of stuff on the client side and is X aware. I.e. it keeps track of X bitmaps and will use jpeg compression on them when sending them across, renders fonts locally, etc. It is *MUCH* more responsive than running an X app remotely over ssh.
I've found NX to be quite usable even when the available bandwidth is fairly low whereas VNC would be useless. It actually seemed faster to run my web browser over NX rather than running it locally.
Sometimes I wish it could behave more like running a remote X application without having to bring up the entire desktop, but other than I'm a convert.
I've also seen a lot of VNC servers get borked where a VNC session suddenly starts gobbling up 100% of the CPU. I don't know if that's been fixed yet, but it was a major problem when I used it.
Re: (Score:3)
Well NX is a totally different thing to VNC anyway isn't it? I mean it's not just sending pixel data, which is all VNC ever does, even if it is compressed pixel data. NX to me is a Unix-flavoured version of RDP where it does clever stuff. Only it is tied to a platform too which is its biggest downfall.
Re: (Score:2)
Chicken and egg problem.
I find that from gigabit LAN usage, I would MOST DEFINITELY use the hell out of "X Forwarding" if it wasn't so godawful slow. I'm sure I'm not alone in this opinion.
Conventional systems such as RDP and VNC are tough, because the 'windowed' mode of it wastes a lot of space and makes it hard to integrate what your doing into your local environment. Systems that get around this (like Citrix) really are doing what X Forwarding does anyways.
Re: (Score:2)
This seems the obvious solution to me. If their previous releases were under GPL, there's nothing stopping anyone from releasing a fork.