Re: Re: About our effort at NoMachine

On Tuesday 25 March 2003 01:13 am, Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
>
> I've not seen any other announcement for it....

I wrote a story for Slashdot but it was not accepted.

> This is incredible! I mean, I tend to believe yoo, now that I tasted a
> bit of it!

Thanks :-).

> > but aims to make X-Window the
> > standard way to deploy applications to users of any OS.
>
> Does this mean you are also offering an X-Server for the MS-Windows
> platforms? I didn't find any mentioning of this on your website, I only
> found references to "NX Clients"....

NX Client for Windows IS a X server for the Win32 platform
(based on the Cygwin port) plus the compression software, plus
ssh client, plus some other software, plus the NX GUI that makes
things work together.

>
> > This is not the place to advertise our software,
>
> You did, and I am glad you did.

Frankly speaking it didn't cause much rumor as you are the
only one that posted a comment.

> > - NX provides X, RDP and VNC desktops trasforming
> >   foreign protocols to X protocol.
>
> I didn't get VNC to work with the downloaded free NX client
> for Linux.  (A TightVNC server is installed on a WinXP box here,
> and I can connect to it thru the KDE-3.1-native "krdc" program
> with no problem at all.) It would be interesting to see a
> direct comparison here.

You need a NX server. You cannot connect NX client straight to
the VNC server. What travels between NX server and NX client is
X protocol, so NX server needs to transform RFB to X.

> > - NX is a complete X distribution for MS Windows
>
> OK -- this seems to answer my above question...
>
> > - NX compresses X protocol (and foreign protocols)
> >   to a degree that makes possible to run complete
> >   desktop sessions on a remote server across the
> >   Internet, even through a modem link. A TestDrive
> >   server is available to the public. You can run a KDE
> >   or GNOME session from there, just to try.
>
> I can only recommend everybody to try it. In case people
> have still doubts about the "overhead" the network transparency
> of X imposes on its speed -- here seems to be a striking
> proof that the bottleneck must be somewhere else....

You are right, boy :-).

>
> > - NX makes any Linux workstation a Terminal Server,
> >   in the MS sense.
>
> Yes -- I am very impressed about what you created.
>
> > - NX core software is based on XFree86, OpenSSH,
> >   RDesktop, VNC and other OpenSource components.
> >   All X related stuff developed by NoMachine has
> >   been released under GPL.
>
> Well, probably you didn't have much choice, since you based
> everything upon a few Free software components?   ;-)

Not exactly. The most important and most valuable parts of the software
we wrote are derived from X or from other components that were under X
license. X license doesn't require modifications to be released as X or other
OSS licenses. Infact we didn't release our modifications under X license.
We chose GPL because we want to prevent closed source modifications
of core NX software. Furthermore, some other parts were developed from
scratch, as the Xcompext library that gives you that nice compression of
thumbnails :-). That said, we don't want a medal, but would like at least
be considered good OSS citizens :-).

> What other stuff have you developed to be included in NX that
> is not under GPL?

The top level software. Everything you can do with NX Client and
NX Server can be done by hand, using OSS components. We
count on users being lazy.

>
> > - NX higher level components are commercial software
> >   but any company or good developer could implement
> >   an OpenNX project in a few months, if not weeks.
> >   We know we made a very good job and want to preserve
> >   a competitive advantage, but it's our interest to
> >   have competition. We want to push X and Linux as
> >   a network computing platform.
>
> If more people try and test your product, I am sure the push
> will bear quite some weight.

Maybe I need to recall you that this posting is the only comment
we got so far. I think we'll need a lot of marketing :-).

>
> > If X wins, we win.
>
> What is the secret of the speed you achieved in NX? What kind of
> compression do you use?

Compression software comes from the continuous development of
mlview software we released as GPL 2 years ago.

> > sending PutImage requests for gigabytes. I think that one of the
> > problems of X is that it's just too fast!
>
> I didn't understand the meaning  of this last sentence.

X server performances are so good that programmers, often,
are not motivated to write good X clients. In the case I mentioned,
it was enough to create a Pixmap for each frame of the animation
and use some CopyArea, but the X server was fast enough to
handle all that PutImages, so...

>
> > In our opinion, reason why people tend to forget or ignore X
> > networking is because of the gap between "the possibility" of network
> > transparency and the "availability" for the average user. NX was born
> > to fill this gap. We believe that once made simple to run X
> > applications everywhere in the world, poor clients will just disappear
> > due to lack of users.
>
> I didn't understand what you mean with the "poor clients will just
> disappear" either...

X programmers, sometimes, are so lazy to forget that X is a networking
platform, so they don't pay attention to the fact that a client can work
reasonably fast on the local computer but be tremendously slow over a
network connection. Once people start to use remote X applications
everyday, the poorly implemented X clients will just be improved or
superseded by better clients. BTW, when I say X programmers, I would
better say X tolkits' developers. Just that. Sorry if I was cryptic :-).

/Gian Filippo Pinzari.