Proposal for a Remote Desktop Server.

[Scott Moser]

On Tue, 31 May 2011, Marcelo Boveto Shima wrote:

> Hi,
>
> My name is Marcelo Boveto Shima (https://launchpad.net/~marceloshima).
> I'm the maintainer of FreeNX-Team (https://launchpad.net/~freenx-team).
>
> I was looking at the blueprints and just found that Ubuntu is planning to
> use X2go for Remote Desktop. I don't care if it is included in Ubuntu
> repository, but for a supported (main) solution there are better choices.
>
> X2go is a fork of NX. ~1 year ago I looked at X2go source and there were
> only visual differences about NX sources. So if Ubuntu is planning to
> package X2go sources, please consider to use the package nx-x11 from
> freenx-team PPA instead of x2goagent, then adapt x2goserver to use
> nxagent instead x2goagent.
> nx-x11 package is source v3.0 with multiples archives and x2goagent is
> just a repackaged nx-x11 and nxagent with some patches applied.

We chose x2go as it seems to be the most active NX client and server
option.  x2go does maintain a fork of nxagent under the name 'x2goagent'.
However, the other libraries are not a fork of the nx libraries; x2go
provides a set of api compatible patches for libnx.

The focus for the remote desktop is really to get a fully functional
remote desktop available in Ubuntu.  Incorporating x2go seemed to be the
best option to reach that goal.

We're interested in providing a solution that works.  At this time we
believe that x2go is the best supportable solution.   This by no means
implies that the decision is final for eternity.

Just as an fyi, one thing that was considered was the fact that NoMachine
may not be a long term sustainable upstream for NX.  From
http://www.nomachine.com/news-read.php?idnews=331, see:
  | This release marks an important milestone in the history of the
  | company.  Version 4 of the software, in fact, will be only available
  | under a closed source license.

Additionally, compatibility with the closed source NX client has not been
a major concern.  During the Natty cycle, myself and others were bitten by
trying to rely on the closed source only NX applet in awstrial.  Having a
fully functional open source offering is much more interesting (such as
x2go is trying to develop with their x2goplugin).


> Proposal
>
> As Ubuntu solution for a Remote Desktop Server I propose is to develop
> an new server based on LightDM. Most of the features needed is already
> there.
> LightDM must be able to run an nxagent-wrapper instead of Xorg and
> create a way to the shell to communicate to the nxagent-wrapper.
>
> This is the architecture I used to develop TaciX. TaciX is modular, and have
> support for NXClient and RDP.
>
> So I propose LightDM to add Remote Desktop support and I will help to
> provide the Shell that communicates to NXClient and a server that accepts
> RDP connections.

I'm not sure that I entirely understand what you're suggesting. If your
goal is to extend lightDM to have "remote login" support, so that the
login process would launch some NX client to a remote system, I think that
would be really cool, but it is outside the scope of of the original
goals.

Do you think that such a thing would not be possible using x2go as the
client?