“2X today announced the release of 2X TerminalServer for Linux, an open source terminal server for Linux, which enables users to run a Linux desktop and Linux / Windows applications over any type of connection. “If Linux is going to happen on the desktop, it will require a terminal server approach such as that of 2X Terminal Server for Linux. Only with the more advanced thin client approach, will Linux be able to outdo Windows fat clients in a company’s network. 2X is proud to contribute to this by opening the source code of its terminal server software for Linux.”
I’ve used FreeNX before and it was quite impressive. Think, how much better rdp is than traditional VNC, it’s that much nicer than rdp.
I think this is PR bogus.
2x thin client is PXES linux distribution ( http://pxes.sf.net ) that the company bought and hired the main and only developer (Diego Torres Milano) a year and some months ago (IIRC). It has been always free (under GPL).
And for the terminal server: as it is based on nx libraries from nomachine.com, which are AFAIK released under GPL by !M, they are legally required to “open the source code”. I would guess that someone pointed out that violation (or threatened them with lawsuit) and their PR department cooked up this hypocritical solution. Maybe I’m wrong, though.
I was going to ask “Is this any different than NoMachine’s NX server?” I just installed both, and the setup script looks identical. 2x, in fact, sends you to NoMachine for clients other than Linux.
You are completely wrong in your “PR bogus” allegation.
2X Terminal Server is based on Nomachine version 1.5, for which 2X obtained a license against substantial payment. The Nomachine libraries are open source, however the server and the clients are closed source.
Because 2X has a license to Nomachine 1.5, 2X could legally open source the server. The GPL did not apply in any way because we are talking about the NX server here, and not the NX libraries (which remain open source and are available from Nomachine) 2X’ intention here is to help Linux based thin client computing gain momentum.
In regards to 2X ThinClientServer – it is not based on PXES. It is true that 2X acquired the PXES project, but only select components were merged into 2X ThinClientServer. 2X ThinClientServer has numerous architectural advantages compared to PXES and therefore it was decided to have 2X ThinClientServer PXES edition supercede PXES. 2X ThinClientServer is not open source and there is no legal requirement to do so either.
Nick Galea
2X Software Ltd.
Nick, thank you for your explanation. I was not aware of those facts and I apologize for having blackened laudable intentions of 2X.
I confused your client with PXES because of the acquisition and merging (as you note above). As for the server, I understood it in such way that you built your own programs linked against GPLed NX libraries. My mistake.
Good luck to your company.
I don´t know about this 2X thing, but FreeNX is one of the most impressive pieces of software that I have ever seen on my life. They managed to get make this thing incredibly fast even by tunneling it through SSH. Like the first poster said, it is insanely faster than RDP to the point that it can be fairly usable on a slow dial-up connection.
On a 512 Kb/s DSL link, it almost feels like you´re sitting in front of the machine, even using 16 bit for color depth.
On a decent connection, like a non-capped DSL connection, it feels very nice with 24bit color.
I doubt you could play video with any less than a 100MBit network and very fast hardware on both machines though.
True, but at the end of the day; if you have a pretty large organisation; grab yourself 8 way dual core opteron server, load it to the gills with memory, throw on Solaris with Sunray or Linux/FreeBSD/etc with NX Server, and voila, you have a system that could quite easily provide a stable environment to run Evolution, OpenOffice.org and other office related applications.
What is holding the adoption of thin clients back isn’t the operating systems; the operating systems like *NIX are aalready stable and scalable enough to be able to handle large numbers of users accessing simultaneously, what is required is more mainstream application software vendors like Adobe, Corel and the likes to come on board, and start providing their applications.
Still there is no working native FreeBSD NX client in the wild. Linux version works but then you have to install LCL (Linux Compat Layer) bloat into FreeBSD. Native NX Server side works fine though.
xorg should remove all the crud that relates to the network connections, and concentrate on direct rendering (OpenGL desktops etc…).
For remote connections, they should be done using a terminal server such as this.
xorg should remove all the crud that relates to the network connections, and concentrate on direct rendering (OpenGL desktops etc…).
For remote connections, they should be done using a terminal server such as this.
I unh… where do I start…
This IS an X server. It relies on ‘all that networking crud’ to transperantly do it’s magic on *nix based hosts. If X11 didn’t use sockets, this wouldn’t exist.
Any modern OS GUI requires a method of abstracting the display hardware away from the applications. X11 uses local sockets because it ensures that the applications can not crash the display driver (the Xorg server) because it’s not working in the same memory. This is a Good Thing.
The alternatives are shared memory or pipes, or making the application talk directly to the display hardware. OR, you can do some weird hack where your program attaches directly to the hardware driver. Not the best idea.
Xorg using local sockets means that we get ‘that networking crud’ for basically free. It also means that NX, 2X, Xvnc, and X over SSH are a heck of a lot more robust and easy to write.
I don’t see much info about the GPL client. Is this an error from OSNews?
It wasn’t that long ago that they were refusing to comply with the GPL. See http://www.cendio.com/news/gplviolation/
Hi Eudoxos, Thanks for your nice post. 🙂 BTW, it is our intention to open source the Windows NX client as well asap – this is a lot of source code and will help the project a lot. All the clients that we have will be open sourced as soon as possible.
Just to be clear – we have open sourced the NX server, which is roughly equivalent to version 1.5 of Nomachine. NX server uses the NX libraries (the compression and decompression of the X traffic). These have already been open sourced by Nomachine a long time ago. The full credit for those NX libraries (which are complex and many years of work by the nomachine team) lies of course with Nomachine.
In reply to Justinbest’s post – please note that the cendio press release was not factually correct. Not surprisingly, Cendio are our competitors. We believe that Cendios main intention was to get some PR mileage at the cost of 2X. Something we did not appreciate, but thats how the world works unfortunately. 🙁
In any case, the NX server open sourcing is a genuine effort to help NX and thin client computing on Linux in particular. We are well aware that this will only work with the full support of the Linux community, so anyone who has any questions in regards to the why’s and how’s of this open sourcing please dont hesitate to contact us or to post here.
Nick Galea
2X Software Ltd.