[FreeNX-kNX] Wishlist for FreeNX / NX

[Kurt Pfeifle]

On Tuesday 01 February 2005 10:19, Senthil Nachimuthu wrote:

> 1. Ability to change network bandwidth in the middle of a session. 
> I may be sitting in the conference room and use wireless. When I go
> to my cubicle, I want to plug-in to the LAN and get a better
> bandwidth.

This works already. NX always takes all bandwidth that it can get, if
it needs it. 

(Explanation: if you use the slider control in NoMachine NX Client
ranging from "Modem ..... LAN", this is just changing the compression
level from "highest" (for Modem conections) to "none" (for LAN). I
personally always use the "Modem" (highest) level ocmpresseion, even
on ADSL and LAN, and the results I get are always highly satisfying.
Highest compression may loose some quality in some areas (some desktop
wallpapers will show JPEG-like artifacts), but I dont care for this.
Highest compression also needs some more CPU for NX, but again, I
dont care much, because my client hardware is recent enough to not
matter for that, and the NX servers I access dont have many dozen
concurrent sessions, so they still can cope with the compression 
workload too.)

The "change compression level on the fly" may be introduced in the
future. But it is to be put into the base libraries developed by
NoMachine.com. If it is in there, FreeNX can easily use it too. For
me personally, this is not something I'd give a high priority to.

> 2. Portability of X sessions 
> I want to work on an X session while I am sitting in front of my *nix
> machine, and I want to be able to connect to the same session using
> NX. I also want to be able to and suspend and resume from same or
> different NX installed computer / network or go back to the actual
> Linux machine and continue the same session. This way, I can work
> locally or remotely and I can keep my applications open all the time.

This works already -- to a degree. It works for session migrations
where the next client has the same display depth and resolution for
sure. (There are problems with Windows NX clients -- the Win NX Client
internally uses a X Window inside the Windows desktop, which is set
to "fullscreen". That means you can only migrate sessions from a 
Windows to a Linux/Unix/MacOSX client and back if these are 
"fullscreen" too and have the same resolution and color depth as
the NX Client window on Windows.)

Again, this is a feature that is rooted in the NX libraries made by
NoMachine. NoMachine are working on makeing NX session migrations
even better than they are now already.

> 3. Network fault tolerance
> If the network connection gets disconnected (e.g. Wireless router
> dies, dialup connection disconnects, Windows crashes on the client
> machine, etc), I want the session to persist on the server, so that I
> can resume it. That is, even if I dont suspend the session, if there
> is a disconnection, I want to be able to connect to the same session
> and continue my work.

Works perfectly for me. (Read my blog at www.kdedevelopers.org/blog
from last Friday, to see my mentioning that, due to massive network
problmes, I got 400 disconnections within 4 days, and could resume
the session in all cases. I didnt loose a single bit of data (just
a lot of time, being disconnected every 3 or 4 minutes).

> 4. Resizeable X display
> Using RANDR extensions to make the NX desktop resizeable. Because,
> when I work on a PC with a high-res monitor, I would use 1600 by
> 1200, but my laptop can only run 1024 by 768.

Again, that will be in the NX libraries from NoMachine. This is
work in progress, AFAIK.

> Please add to this wishlist, or address any of these points as you
> please.
> 
> Thanks to the NX team for developing a really great product.

I think all FreeNX users and developers would join in to that:
the NoMachine NX team and their lead developers are doing a 
really great job!

> Best regards,
> 
> Senthil.

Cheers,
Kurt