Proposal for a Remote Desktop Server.

[Marcelo Shima]

Em 01/06/2011, às 12:58, Scott Moser <smoser at ubuntu.com> escreveu:

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.


As far as I know x2goagent is just visual patches too.
No bug fixes, no features, no api changes.

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.


I am aware of it.
Spice seems the best alternative for the future.

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).


A plugin is a nice idea. So go for it.


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.


Yes. That's the reason I'm proposing it here.

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


It is possible and can be a goal.
In lightdm language it would be a x2go greeter.
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