Woohoo -- Aaron is coding on nxc libs and a FreeNX Client!

Sunday, 22 May 2005  |  pipitas

Aaron's got a better laptop. Hey, that isn't very spectacular in itself. But what thrills me, is that the first thing he has worked on with that new asset of his is......... (drum-drum-drum-druuuummmm!) .... FreeNX, or rather its client libary, nxc.

Woohooo! Aaron, come here, fetch yourself a big hug and two cookies! ;-)

KDE has already an NX client cough. It is called kNX and is at home in the kdenonbeta module of CVS/SVN. It works, sort of. It doesn't support SSL encryption yet. Thinking of its coming into this world, it actually is a brilliant little thing: it was created in only two half-day coding sessions during last year's LinuxTag (while visitors watched the progress, and often enough wanted to get a demo of some other KDE program in between).

Unfortunately, since that date, the original authors didn't have any time free to get kNX into a really polished shape, not even as a standalone application. Other duties of life, such as university exams and job had to take precedence.

Things have become better since LinuxTag, though:

  • The FreeNX core contributor team has expanded to 6 people.
  • The FreeNX-kNX mailing list has silently grown to well over 300 subscribers.
  • The FreeNX Freshmeat project is amongst the fastest growing in popularity (besides NoMachine NX, of course); it even received some favourable ratings.
  • There were a few FreeNX releases, each of which added new features the (last one, code-named SambaXP Edition, added printing and file sharing).
  • The new nxc library has been created by Lawrence Rouffail from the origins of some older NoMachine code.
  • The first usage for nxc was in the moznx browser plugin (which lets you install an NX client and run an NX session from a browser window).
  • The nxc and FreeNX projects joined forces.
  • nxc now allows to create NX clients with only a few lines of code.
  • FreeNX moved to a CVS repository.
  • nxc got checked in too.
  • Fabian (the FreeNX lead developer) a few weeks ago did a first raw version of linking nxc into kNX and found the result works better than the original code.
  • The main weakness remained all the time: lack of a good KDE-integrated NX client.

Now that Aaron shifts his engine into first gear, I am sure it won't be too long until we see a very nicely and well integrated NX client appear in KDE. NX as well as KDE deserve better than the current proof-of-concept kNX state.

Aaron, I don't see your nxc code improvements in the repository yet. Shall we set you up with a FreeNX CVS account?