The Nomachine folks released a new major version of NX, highlights include (shamelessly taken from the release announcement):
- Desktop sharing
NX 3.0.0 gives remote access to the local display of the Unix workstation where the server is installed, meaning that users and system administrators can now get quick access to all the computer’s resources and remotely control any NX-enabled PC over the Internet.
- Session shadowing
Multiple users can now connect to a NX session at the same time, show and share files, demonstrate software and presentations, even chat with the other users on the server. Session shadowing is supported for all remote desktop protocols, including RDP (Windows Terminal Server) and VNC
- Full support for the x86_64 architecture
- Screen scaling capabilities
NX is now able to scale the content of the frame-buffer, to offer thumbnails of the remote desktop or to fit the desktop in a smaller screen.
- Dynamic reordering of the screen updates
Based on the available bandwidth and the current level of congestion, NX will defer the most bandwidth-consuming operations to give precedence to interactivity. With browsers and office applications, for example, NX will reorder the screen updates to show first the textual output. With videos and games, NX will drop the intermediate frames,similarly to the way a media player would do in the same conditions, if the bandwidth is not sufficient to keep the frame rate of the requesting application.
- Greatly reduced session reconnection times
Special attention was paid to ensuring that sessions can be migrated from a computer to another in literally no time. As an example, the time for reconnecting a GNOME session through a modem link went from the 2-3 minutes, required with the 2.x.x code-base, to 15 seconds.
- Bug fixes, no more need for compatibility libstdc++
nxserver-freeedition is now bumped in portage, enjoy and test
As for freenx, the new features will need to be added, so if you want them, please send a mail to frenx mailing list or directly to Fabian Franz (the freenx developer) to motivate him 😉 Read Fabian’s post and tell him “thanks!”
GNUstep-interested people, you’re not forgotten, the overlay heavy work is now mostly done, we’re in bug-fixing mode now. Etoile should soon release its 0.2 version (yes yes it will be added in the overlay after gnustep in gentoo is fixed)
‘soonish’ now means "available in the NX overlay" 😉
There are a few things that need fixing before I move them in portage, but in the meantime, "layman -a nx" is your friend
Voyageur, how soon is ‘soonish’…:-) Do we even have beta ebuilds for NX 3? I have been trying to get NX working for last 3 years on and off but I always went back to vnc for smoother operations like reconnection. I would like to try NX 3 to see if its any better in terms of reliability than previous versions. Will appreciate if I can get some ebuilds to test.