[plug] NX X protocol compression

[Brad Campbell]

G'day all,

I have an interesting situation where I have to manipulate some large images using Gimp (A job it 
does quite well). The only machine in the office that runs it well is my laptop, and given it only 
has 512MB of ram and a 1Ghz P-III, manipulating A0 images at 24bpp and 300dpi with multiple layers 
is a bit much for it. (An average image appears to be 4-600MB).

In that light I decided that this was a job for my home network and duly procured 1.5GB of ram for 
the desktop machine which is an Athlon 2800+ running diskless off a separate server (2.2TB of Raid-5 
for bulk storage and 500GB of Raid-0 for OS/Scratch/Swap over NFS and NBD). The whole setup works 
quite well.

The issue is that home and office are connected via an 802.11 link at 11Mbits. Fine and dandy, so 
the real world performance is between 350 & 500 KB/s. This makes Gimp over X a bit laggy, and doing 
things like zooming and panning is a bit of a pain. I tried forwarding over SSH with compression but 
it only made a marginal improvement.

Tried running tightvnc and that was quite a bit better but still really laggy on re-draws.

I have tried most of the low bandwidth X proxies in a past life and found them all to be lacking 
somewhat, so I fired up google and came up with www.nomachine.com.
Great, it's payware but based on GPL components and this page "documents" how to get it running bare 
bones.
http://www.nomachine.com/documentation/building-components.php

It appears to take X on one side, convert it to RFB (VNC protocol) and then back to X on the other 
side. It uses lossy compression on images and artifacts can certainly be seen, but it's quick!
Over my link it's certainly as fast as a LAN connection.

It's not easy to get running, they charge for all the stuff that makes it easy to get running, but 
the core free stuff works and is really tweakable when you actually figure out how to get it working.

The end result is I can now mark up these plans and do what I need to do with 1/10th the level of 
frustration of trying to do it locally or driving home to do it and I did not need to fork out for 
another machine in the office.

Niiiiice.

On another note. I have been investigating building another raid array. 15 250GB drives in hotswap 
enclosures in a Raid-6 exported as a block device over firewire. This should give about 3TB (Real 
Terrabytes not base 10) of storage for about 5.7k AUD. Novel idea anyway and with the firewire 
interface, dead easy to plug into anything.

Regards,
Brad