Posted by George Wright
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:48:00 GMT
Today’s been a somewhat hectic day for me; after getting up at 0500 to get to Heathrow by 0700, I managed to get on my 1030 flight to Arlanda and arrive in Stockholm just after 1400. After hopping on a train to Linköping, I was greeted by my contact at Cendio, Peter Åstrand, who has been exceptionally helpful and accommodating with my moving in.
I’m staying in university accommodation which is rather nice; it’s a bit Ikea-y, but not too shabby. There was a particularly bad dead fly infestation in my room but a dustpan and brush seems to have taken care of most of it, and I may have to vacuum around when I can get hold of one. The luxury of an en-suite is always welcome, and I have a 10Mbit/s internet connection which is definitely most welcome!
My room
As for my job out here, I’ll be working on the next release of ThinLinc, Cendio’s flagship remote desktop product. At first I believe I’m mainly doing testing of the upcoming release to ensure it meets quality standards, but Peter is keen for me to dig into the coding side soon.
In my spare time, I decided to bring my bike over and I’ll hopefully spend most of my evenings racing around the roads on it. It really is a delightful little machine. When I’m not on the bike I hope to get some work done on nxcl/qtnx as well.
The bike
Posted in Computing, Misc | 10 comments
Posted by George Wright
Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:05:00 GMT
My exams finally finished about 2 weeks ago, and since then I’ve been vegetating (mainly in bed, on my bike or shooting) so I’ve not really been doing much in the way of work.
My roadmap for the summer is fairly packed; on Monday I move to Sweden to work for Cendio on their ThinLinc stuff then after three weeks out there I’m moving back to London to work from there for the rest of the summer.
Interspersed with ThinLinc work I’ll be doing lots of work on NX hopefully and working on my nxcl 2.x branch with my Summer of Code student, who is starting to make progress with his stuff now that his academic commitments are finally over!
I think this summer will be the best summer for open source NX work there has been; we now have a fairly mature server in the form of FreeNX, and my client is taking shape in the form of nxcl/qtnx, and the work on nxcl 2.x will be a much needed restructuring of the client code.
It would be great if anyone interested in NX at all could take a look at my nxcl 2.x roadmap and give me any feedback as to what they’d also like to see or see changed. I’ll also be working with Seb James on his GTK+ based frontend as well (nxlaunch) and hopefully we’ll see a fairly decent KDE and GNOME client come out of all this work.
Posted in KDE, NX | 1 comment
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 26 May 2008 21:26:00 GMT
With my parents going on holiday to Taiwan last month I asked them to pick me up an Eee PC to play with. It’s a really nice little machine; I got the 8GB flash/1GB RAM model, and I’m very impressed with how responsive it is. Even Open Office is fairly nippy…
The keyboard is a little small and takes a bit of getting used to, but I can just about touch type on it now. The machine as a whole is very sturdy and seems solidly built, and the touch pad is just about usable (the mouse button isn’t too great though). The screen is a little grainy but very crisp - it seems better than the screen on my X40 (albeit at a lower resolution) - and the default Xandros distribution is quite nice.
Anyway, I’ve built qtnx debs for the Xandros that is on there (I added the Debian Etch repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list to complement the default Eee repositories) and uploaded them to my server if anyone wishes to use them (hit ctrl-alt-T to bring up a terminal, then use dpkg -i to install them). The configuration dialogue doesn’t quite fit on the screen but you can use the alt+mouse button trick to drag the window around.
Posted in Computing, NX | 3 comments
Posted by George Wright
Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:33:00 GMT
Congratulations to Gross David for successfully being selected to take part in the Summer of Code this year to work on NX support in krdc. Hopefully this will lead to some interesting changes ahead!
Posted in KDE, NX | no comments
Posted by George Wright
Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:02:00 GMT
Thanks to Matthew Johnson, both qtnx and nxcl are packaged in Debian Sid for all to use. This is a slightly modified version of nxcl which uses openssh instead of nxssh thanks to some recent work done by Fabian Franz. nxproxy and nxcomp should be coming soon it seems.
I should be releasing a minor update to nxcl/qtnx in the next few days to address some issues regarding custom keys and including the new openssh code.
Posted in NX | 3 comments
Posted by George Wright
Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:57:00 GMT
Today I finally decided to make a formal release of qtnx and nxcl, both version 0.9 as they are not tested enough to be a 1.0 release yet, especially as I made some API changes to nxcl which might have broken Seb’s nxlaunch frontend.
They’ve been tagged in freenx’s subversion at svn://svn.berlios.de/freenx/tags/freenx-client-0.9. Relevant instructions are in the README files for both subdirectories.
Debian packages should be appearing shortly courtesy of Matthew Johnson.
Posted in NX | 4 comments
Posted by George Wright
Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:57:00 GMT
As Google have announced the Summer of Code for 2008, I would rather like to see NX support finally appearing in krdc, KDE’s pet remote desktop connection client.
Back in 2006 I did a fair bit of work on an abstract client library for NX, and in 2007, Urs Wolfer did a fantastic job of cleaning up krdc and making it far easier to add a different backend to it. What I’d like to see is someone come forward this year and tie these two efforts together to make an unbelievably awesome NX client for KDE.
I’ve put up a preliminary proposal at the KDE SoC wiki, and I’m quite happy to mentor the project so long as the KDE demigods agree (Thiago?)
Posted in NX | 6 comments
Posted by George Wright
Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:24:00 GMT
So today I released what is hopefully something very close to the final release of my NX client, but this time as a branded version for Desktop on Demand.
The Windows client has now been tested a lot more thoroughly, and it shouldn’t freeze anymore (due to some lovely hacks… turns out that the Qt/Cygwin build likes to freeze if you’re using the Windows XP native theme engine, so I told it to use Plastique), doesn’t bring up an ugly terminal window and it no longer fullscreens the NX window in all cases.
The OS X client has had minor usability updates as it was all pretty much working beforehand anyway. It’s generally a lot nicer to use and I’ve confirmed it works on both OS X 10.4 and 10.5 (x86 platforms).
The best thing about both these clients is that they do not need installation to the computer; I tested them by putting them on USB flash disks and taking them to friends’ computers and seeing if they’d connect without any trouble - and they did.
Kudos to NoMachine for being incredibly helpful about the NXWin problems; they created a knowledge base article detailing exactly how to compile it and also updated the source packages as the original ones I used didn’t work at all. I’m very impressed with how quickly they got back to me on this!
The clients are now available from here and their md5sums are:
61c3902c6ae4342b23c303425bfb6718 Desktop on Demand.dmg.zip
f0d24af8e1900cdc7fd4ab9470245113 Desktop on Demand.zip
As for Linux, I’ve yet to package that; I will be packaging a standalone tarball with the NX client statically linked to Qt. For those of you who don’t like that, there’s always the source code in the FreeNX subversion repository and NoMachine’s site.
Posted in Computing, NX | 5 comments
Posted by George Wright
Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:34:00 GMT
I’ve been working hard overnight and I am now finally in a position to release a zip of QtNX for Windows. Please note that this is very alpha quality, but it works here and I’d appreciate feedback of any kind about it.
Known bugs include QtNX not working unless being set to Windows 2000 compatibility mode, NX windows not being resizeable and there’s also a really annoying terminal window that pops up when loading.
If anyone knows any solutions to these problems (the terminal one is really annoying!) then please get in touch!
I’ve uploaded the zip of it to my server (8.1MB, md5sum is c4d948cc1ca13bb888ba6496b2eb1eac).
Posted in NX | 7 comments
Posted by George Wright
Wed, 30 Jan 2008 06:41:00 GMT
I’ve finally got a package ready for Mac OS X to use. I’ve been working on 10.4.11, so it’s untested on Leopard, but it works just fine over here. Bugs include the actual QtNX window freezing if anything goes wrong and other random breakages.
The package is fairly nifty - the user interface is a statically linked Qt binary and has barely any dependencies. In the qtnx.app directory is all the NX stuff you need - nxauth, nxssh, nxproxy etc, as well as the default key to login with and many other things. The client does not need to be installed and should just run from inside the dmg image!
The only requirement is that you have X11 from Apple installed, as the client calls “open -a X11” in order to get an X server to use, as packaging X11 seems to be beyond the scope of this, especially given that Apple have made X11 more integral to OS X since the release of Leopard.
QtNX on OS X - Working!
For those of you who want to try it out, I’ve uploaded a zip of the DMG image here (6.8MB, md5sum is eaca6a99b72206554b419bff7a0a1dd1).
As usual, comments are most welcome via email.
Posted in NX | 7 comments
