Re: About our effort at NoMachine

On Tuesday 25 March 2003 07:38 pm, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> P> - NX compresses X protocol (and foreign protocols)
> P>   to a degree that makes possible to run complete
> P>   desktop sessions on a remote server across the
> P>   Internet, even through a modem link.
>
> Your website seems to imply that you do magic to deal with latency.
> Any chance for any more information on that ?  (Pointers to papers are
> more than welcome, and I'd also understand if you wouldn't tell.)
>
>                                         Juliusz

Sorry, I read my reply and it looks picky, that was not my intention :-)
As I told in my first mail we didn't expect much interest about -how- 
this stuff was working, not yet, at least. Documents are currently
aimed at users, not developers :-).

I tried to explain how NX is working, but I realize that's far from
enough. I'll add some sidenotes:

- NX doesn't add any special request or extension to the X protocol.
  It is a set of tools on top of X aimed to make X ubiquitous.

- The performances of remote X sessions are due to nxagent's
  ability to optimize the X traffic and the compression performances
  of Xcomp/nxproxy.

- Xlib modifications are needed to simplify the way you run
  agents and to perform some other functions like cleaning padding
  bytes in requests and (something LBX was not doing) in images.

- Xcompext library is needed to let agents compress images in
  various formats and transform replies in events.

That's all. There is no magic implied, really :-).

/Gian Filippo.