NoMachine NX
Have you heard of NoMachine NX before? You are not alone ;-). I was mailing with Kurt Pfeifle (you might know him e.g. by his CUPS-HowTos) because of Ludwigsburg and he mentioned NX. I was interested in it and at the weekend Kurt provided me a test-account. NX is a technology to make X connections work reliably and fast even over very slow and low-bandwidth links.
The server I was using is located in germany and I was running a 40-minute test with heavy use of OpenOffice, Konqueror, KMail and MozillaFirefox. I used iptraf to measure the network-traffic. Running for 40 minutes gave me 39509 packets, that’s 16265683 bytes with an average of 6.619 KiB/sec. Due to Kurt “fluent working” is possible with at least ~40 kBit/sec.
KDE-Developers are working on a free integration of NX into KDE. For me that’s a quite interesting technology because there might be serious competitors to Citrix, Tarantella & CO. And for me commandline tools are (among other things) such usefull because of the possibility to use them remote (e.g. via ssh). This might change in the future…
Ressources:
NX — A New Stage For Network Desktop Computing by Kurt Pfeifle on Linux-Kongress 2003
KDE developers announce support for NX client and server functionalities