FreeNX
I've just had my first session with FreeNX in an LTSP environment today. First
impressions are mixed. The compression is impressive, for flash movies more
than 100x. But for interactive sessions the latency renders the page almost
useless. The colour depth is less, some icons are off and text is misplaced
sometimes. General responsitivity is less than with a clean X session. There
are bound to be tradeoffs, of course.
From what I understand, the protocol used is diffed pngs, which explain why
things look a bit strange.
The load on the server when showing graphics intensive apps like flash is
about the same with and without nx. In other apps it's higher.
The setup was a Sarge based server with LTSP 4.1, packages for NX client built
in LBE, and a Sarge package for freenx server side as shown on the Ubuntu web
site. It was a breeze to make work, but a few rough edges during the login
process.
Does it use less bandwidth? Definitely.
Is it useful? Perhaps. Not definitely.
--
Ragnar Wisløff
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life is a reach. then you gybe.
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