“Using VNC to remotely access your desktop, applications, and documents sounds like a great solution when you are out and about, but it has a few significant drawbacks: you have to leave your machine turned on, the VNC protocol is not secure, and often you need a dedicated VNC client to access your desktop. Ulteo, the company started by Gael Duval of Mandriva fame, is set to offer an alternative solution. Ulteo gives you access to a full-fledged KDE desktop hosted on the company’s own servers while taking care of the behind-the-scenes stuff. While the service is still in beta and by invitation only, I had a chance to take it for a spin, and I found it promising.”
… I’d rather deal with a slow RDesktop connection then have a company have full access to anything I do…
My users run X desktops at remote offices in different cities from centralized desktop servers. And I also have some experience, unfortunately, with RDP. Believe me, RDP beats VNC for speed and quality hands down. But neither can touch freenx on the server with Nomachine’s NX client on the workstations. It’s in a class by itself, and quite simply amazing. Yeah, it sucks using a proprietary client. But the server is Free. The FOSS “knx” client will be ready some day. And I can’t very well subject my users to VNC out of sheer FOSS idealism.
Edited 2008-01-31 21:59 UTC
I highly doubt it could beat Apple Remote Desktop, which isn’t free as well
I can’t say, because I have no experience with Apple’s product. But NX will provide a snappy enough desktop for everyday use over a 56k modem connection. I could not run a whole branch office over that, of course. But for a single user it is, in general, quite usable. And remember, the NX server and libraries are FOSS. It’s just the client that isn’t (yet).
Well, since ARD is simply a few propietry extensions to VNC, it most likely does.
The good thing about it is that it’s essentially a VNC server included with every copy of OS X. Unfortunately, you have to change a setting in System Prefs before it lets non-ARD clients connect.
Apple Remote Desktop == an Apple GUI for VNC.
What happened to ssh-tunneled X? It’s been some time that I last heard someone talking about that.
Performance is, in general, poor. Not *so* bad for single apps. But running a whole desktop is way too slow. You see, the X protocols’ major problem when running over a WAN is not bandwidth, but latency. It is a *very* chatty protocol, with questions and answers flying back and forth between client and server. Many, many round trips are involved. It can run nicely on surprisingly low bandwidth, but even 100ms of latency is enough to absolutely *kill* performance. This should not be surprising, since X was born into a world of LANs which were slow by comparison to today’s multi-megabit/sec broadband internet connections, but had sub-millisecond latencies. SSH tunneled X gives you compression, which helps with bandwidth, but does little to nothing for latencies. There was a project, LBX, for Low Bandwidth X that tried to make X faster over modem connections. But the author (Jim Gettys, I believe) eventually concluded that you couldn’t do much better than tunneling it over SSH. However, later on, he stated that it was really an implementation issue and that 90% of the round trips could be eliminated, and set to work to do that. That was a few years ago, and I’m not sure what the status is today. VNC gets around the problem by running a virtual X server in memory on the server, and uses a frame buffer based protocol over the wire. NX adds very aggressive caching and compression to the X protocols and works very well, indeed.
I still use ssh tunneled X occasionally. But only in a pinch.
Edited 2008-01-31 23:13 UTC
very old.
http://www.workspot.com/
(it used to be free to use though)
“This means that you can’t, for example, use the command line,”
Why use Linux then ? ROTFL.
My thoughts exactly.
And with a 45 second startup time, I would have thought that your session is being virtualized anyway in which case there shouldn’t be any security concerns with allowing users access to a terminal.
Most people can just install linux to their had drive. If they want portability, take a live-cd. If they want to save their settings and files use a usb drive linux. It’s fast, reliable, secure and doesn’t need the internet. It does everything this does better than this. So why should people use Ulteo?
Right now it seems like this drive to net-based computing seems more like a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist yet. Whether trying to fit a desktop GUI in a browser or coverting to web-based applications, they both just seem like reinterpretations of the present desktop computing paradigm, which has been working pretty well now, and as such these solutions offer a questionable return in exchange for the shortcomings.
Certainly businesses have reasons for moving to thin-client approaches with regards to centralizing applications, virtualizing servers and locking down data, but I don’t think that makes it a universal solution.
I’d like to see someone come up with an idea that changes the way our computing experience works by having a network-based overlay. Accessing my applications from any browser in an internet cafe is nice, but then I can already do that with our corporate network. Besides, using Excel over a citrix java-client is enough to make me want to carry my laptop everywhere instead, even if it requires 100GB of locally installed applications.
I don’t know if Ulteo is going to be able to advance to being more than a remote desktop, which frankly begs the question of why? But I’ve been thinking about the Nokia acquisition of Tt, and Nokia’s drive towards mobile computing, which will ultimately require some well-thought engineering to accomodate lower network speeds and lower-resource availability on those handsets if they’re really going to pull it off. It’s going to be interesting to see where they are going to go there.
I don’t like to be one to say “what’s the point” normally, and sometimes the best ideas originate from one person ignoring the naysayers. But until I’m sure of what the problem is, I’m not sure of what the proper solution should be either.
I don’t think this is meant to replace any kind of local OS install. The fact that you need a broadband connection, a modern web browser and a java plugin kind of bears that out.
Instead I think this is going to be targeted at corporate installs who have remote users that need access to local profiles and files. Taking this idea further, it probably ties nicely into a server and management framework. If they can price it substantially less than comparable windows remote solutions, well I think they may be on to something.
Just my $.02.
Wasn’t this supposed to be one (of the supposedly many) services around Ulteo? IIRC, the idea was to give the user the possibility to have a remote desktop and a local one, each one targeted at different needs, of course.
Anyway, I got tired of Ulteo long ago, mostly because the lack of information about it. In general terms, it’s a good idea to tease the crowd a little, but announcing some “revolutionary” product and then keep people waiting for what, years? to show some not-so-exciting features isn’t a good one.
Just my two cents, of course.
NX is without doubt a superb product. I have successfully used it with a 28.8K dialup connection, and it’s perfectly usable. The Ulteo deal-breaker for me is the approximate 10 minute time limit they put on the free sessions. That makes it worthless for me, as I will never have enough of a need to pay for their premium service.