On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 3:03 AM, Keith Keller kkeller@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us wrote:
On Thu, Mar 03, 2011 at 03:49:37PM -0800, Dr. Ed Morbius wrote:
I meant to note earlier: the upstream NX developers have gone non-free, no?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/NX_technology#License
Version 4, which is in beta, looks non free. We'll see what happens there.
Is there a free software development branch?
Presumably the freenx developers will fork the 3.x branch, but this relies on NoMachine continuing to distribute a 3.x-compatible client. If they cease distributing the older client, the freenx-server folks will have difficulties.
Some other alternatives, references from the above wikipedia page:
http://code.google.com/p/neatx/ (no client?)
Neatx is entirely reliant on the "nx" toolkit, it's only python wrappers to get a server to work. I've personally written and submitted .spec files for it, and for various reasons just wrote a RHEL 6 .spec file for it.
I can't recommend it. It's incomplete abandonware, nominally easier to set up than FreeNX (which is why someone I worked with wound up using it) but entirely unmaintained, and it has significant bugs with dead session, especially on reboot, and it lacks other useful features such as shared sessions.
It's more abandonware. I'm afraid that for personal use, I'm recommending a test of the version 4 and consider using the free, though closed source, tools from the company that wrote the protocol, or buying licenses.
http://code.google.com/p/partiwm/wiki/xpra (not a remote desktop, but at least GPL)
Potentially useful for persistent X sessions, I see. If I didn't benefit from all the other features of NX (such as the bandwidth reduction and cheap/free and lightweight X server for Windows), I'd consider pursuing it.