No Machines NX solution has been around for a while. It is an equivalent of RDP (remote desktop protocol in the MS windows world) which supports resumable sessions. It opens the door the conventional X-protocol was not designed to operate on, which is efficient usage of bandwidth.
Setup – The environment I tested consists of the following components:
- A server, in my case a Debian Etch
- A client, mac OS X Tiger on a macbook
- X11 on OS X
- freenx server-3.2.0-13 from No Machine
- nxclient-3.2.0-9, there are other platforms.
- A window manager on the server, I use e17 (see screenshot in the end)
- In case you wonder, my connection is an Adsl 2+ with 14mbps down and 1mbps up. Ping to the server under normal network load is 20ms.
Performance – “Wow”, that’s all I can say. The performance is just great! Compared to RDP, I think they are on the same level, or possibly better: the special effects (animations) in e17 worked flawlessly, the transitions were smooth. Flipping desktop had a little delay, not quite noticable though. During usage it uses approximately 20kb/s (kilobytes) of the pipe.
Security – You shouldn’t worry about security as NX traffics are tunneled through SSH by default, hence you only need to open port 22 on the server side.
QtNX – George Wright released a QT-based nxclient for OS X. This is an alternative of nxclient if you dislike the X11-aqua-like interface components.
Drawbacks – First is its X11 requirement, this means a lot of things; like no clip-board integration. GDM (or any Desktop manager) doesn’t support NX (as of this writing). This can be worked around pretty easily with a wrapper (or I hope so). I’m considering to add it to my projects queue.
Experiments – In the future some hard-benchmarks can prove freenx’ competence. For now it has convinced me enough.
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