[Discuss] FreeNx

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-11-18 16:34-0800 John Blomfield wrote:

> Hi,
> Has anyone any experience with FreeNx?  I have my main and backup computers 
> hooked together with a KVM at present but have been thinking a much nicer 
> solution would be to use FreeNx to control all my computers when plugged into 
> my network?

I think of FreeNX as a way to accelerate X communications over a low
bandwidth high-latency network.  In practice, though, I find it is not
needed for typical home LAN speeds of 100Mb/s.  For example, for our
thin-client configuration (X-terminal), we don't bother with it because
there is no noticable difference in X access speed locally or over our
100Mb/s LAN.

Let's call your boxes, box1, box2, and box3, and suppose you want to
have your keyboard and monitor always physically attached to box1.

To get the effect you want, simply set up xdm on box2 and box3 to ignore
their local box, and do display management only for box1. (I had a recent
post to the list about how to set up xdm for X terminals.)

Then suppose you wanted to run applications on box2 transparently from box1

X -query box2

would accomplish this.

Also, you could simultanously have X servers displaying for box1, box2, and
box3 on box1 simply by running startx to start the local session on that
box, and running X -query for box2 and box3 with different display numbers
then what was used for startx.  (man X to see how to set the display
number).

Then switching from one of your boxes to another would simply be a matter of
hitting ctrl-alt-F7, ctrl-alt-F8, or ctr-alt-F9.  X networking support is
truly empowering!

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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