Hi Arnold,
On Sa 19 Mai 2012 21:55:28 CEST Arnold Krille wrote:
I am having some doubts about the future of X2Go and seeking for answers. I saw mails mentioning nx3.6 which seems a bit strange to me given that the next version of nomachine's nx is 4.0. And that is what makes me wonder about the future of x2go: The main parts of x2go (nx-agent and assorted low-level libraries) seem to go closed-source, at least as far as I can tell from their licensing documents. So what happens to X2Go?
There has been a long discussion about the current NX 3.5 code base.
NX 3.5 is based on Xorg 6.9 (I think). Pretty old kind of an Xorg and
probably lacking quite a few security patches reported against Xorg
upstream. This is the main problem of NX. And: it will still be there
with NX 4.0, as NoMachine has not freshed up the Xorg base NX got
forked from (AFAIK, people may correct me here).
The above said is the reason why NX 3.5 (esp. the nxagent/x2goagent)
will not find its way into Debian currently.
X2Go can work with any X agent available but nothing scales as good as
NX. As we do not believe in capturing technologies like VNC or
RemoteFX/RDP when we aim at performance we still stick to NX as GUI
rendering techology. X2Go itself in code is very flexible. If anything
better than NX will appear on the market, we will utilize it.
Sadly the expirience suffered when we updated the nx- libs from 3.4 to 3.5: On WAN-connections its still usable but on LAN X2Go looses in speed and latency and responsiveness against VNC. Which my co- workers really hate.
Then there must be something wrong with your setup. X2Go works on UMTS
(even GPRS) networks as well as on local area network. Not sure what
you are experiencing, but I cannot confirm what you report.
My hope was that next nx-libs might fix this. And they probably will, but not for us when there is a price-tag associated with it.
I am not so sure if NX 4.0 has really improved the NX technology
itself. From what I heard the improvements are rather on the session
protocol, multi-media integration etc.
So how to go on in our case? What is your future planning for X2Go?
Use NX 3.5 for now. We have an alternative approach we currently
discuss but currently we lack man power for even playing with code
snippets.
Do you have plans (and knowledge and manpower) to further develop the nx-libs on the open-source base?
Knowledge: yes, man power: no. What is needed for NX is a
re-integration into Xorg HEAD development. If there was a funding that
would cover 1-2 persons over a couple of months then this could be
feasible, but still: a huge project.
Do you have a promise from nomachine that the libs will go open-source again?
No, there is no real communication between X2Go and NoMachine. Apart
from bug reporting and answering to our reports.
Do you have plans to use a different x-protocol like vnc from tigervnc or turbovnc? (Combining the speed of tigervnc and the features of sessions and apps and storage-forwarding of x2go seems like a good idea to me currently.)
VNC is not an X protocol. Neither does it meet our needs and
requirements for a smooth remote X desktop.
Thanks for your open questions, my answers are just mine. Other
developers may have different answers.
Greets, Mike
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