sunweaver's NET

Introduction

NX is a software suite which implements very efficient compression of the X11 protocol. This increases performance when using X applications over a network, especially a slow one.

NX (v3) has been originally developed by NoMachine and has been Free Software ever since. Since NoMachine obsoleted NX (v3) some time back in 2013/2014, the maintenance has been continued by a versatile group of developers. The work on NX (v3) is being continued under the project name "nx-libs".

Release Announcement

On Thursday, Oct 13th, version 3.5.99.2 of nx-libs has been released [1].

This release brings a major backport of libNX_X11 to the status of libX11 1.3.4 (as provided by X.org). On top of that, all CVE fixes provided for libX11 by the Debian X11 Strike Force and the Debian LTS team got cherry-picked to libNX_X11, too. This big chunk of work has been performed by Ulrich Sibiller and there is more to come. We currently have a pull request pending review that backports more commits from libX11 (bumping the status of libNX_X11 to the state of libX11 1.6.4, which is the current HEAD on the X.org Git site).

Another big clean-up performed by Ulrich is the split-up of XKB code which got symlinked between libNX_X11 and nx-X11/programs/Xserver.

The Background Story

A year ago, or so, I took some time to search the internet for Free Software that can be used for controlling model railways via a computer. I was happy to find Rocrail [1] being one of only a few applications available on the market. And even more, I was very happy when I saw that it had been licensed under a Free Software license: GPL-3(+).

A month ago, or so, I collected my old Märklin (Digital) stuff from my parents' place and started looking into it again after +15 years, together with my little son.

Some weeks ago, I remembered Rocrail and thought... Hey, this software was GPLed code and absolutely suitable for uploading to Debian and/or Ubuntu. I searched for the Rocrail source code and figured out that it got hidden from the web some time in 2015 and that the license obviously has been changed to some non-free license (I could not figure out what license, though).

This made me very sad! I thought I had found a piece of software that might be interesting for testing with my model railway. Whenever I stumble over some nice piece of Free Software that I plan to use (or even only play with), I upload this to Debian as one of the first steps. However, I highly attempt to stay away from non-free sofware, so Rocrail has become a no-option for me back in 2015.

I should have moved on from here on...

Instead...

Proactively, I signed up with the Rocrail forum and asked the author(s) if they see any chance of re-licensing the Rocrail code under GPL (or any other FLOSS license) again [2]?

Introduction

NX is a software suite which implements very efficient compression of the X11 protocol. This increases performance when using X applications over a network, especially a slow one.

NX (v3) has been originally developed by NoMachine and has been Free Software ever since. Since NoMachine obsoleted NX (v3) some time back in 2013/2014, the maintenance has been continued by a versatile group of developers. The work on NX (v3) is being continued under the project name "nx-libs".

Release Announcement

On Tuesday, Sep 13th, version 3.5.99.1 of nx-libs has been released [1].

This release brings some code cleanups regarding displayed copyright information and an improvement when it comes to reconnecting to an already running session from an X11 server with a color depths setup that is different from the X11 server setup where the NX/X11 session was originally created on. Furthermore, an issue reported to the X2Go developers has been fixed that caused problems on Windows clients on copy+paste actions between the NX/X11 session and the underlying MS Windows system.

sunweaver sighs...

This short post is to inform all Debian MATE users that the recent GTK-3+ upload to Debian (GTK-3+ v3.21) broke most parts of the MATE 1.14 desktop environment as currently available in Debian testing (aka stretch). This raises some questions here on the MATE maintainers' side...

Questions

1. Isn't GTK-3+ a shared library? This one was rhetorical... Yes, it is.

2. One that breaks other application with every point release? Well, unfortunately, as experience over the past years has shown: Yes, this has happened several times, so far — and it happened again.

3. Why is it that GTK-3+ uploads appear in Debian without going through a proper transition? This question is not rhetorical. If someone has an answer, please enlighten me.

Potential Counter Measures

For Debian MATE users running on Debian testing: This is untested, but it is quite likely that your MATE desktop environment will work again, once you have reverted your GTK-3+ library back to v3.20. For obtaining old Debian package versions, please visit the https://snapshots.debian.org site.

Prospective

The MATE 1.16 release is expected for Sep 20th, 2016. We will do our best to provide MATE 1.16 in Debian before this month is over. MATE 1.16 will again run smoothly (so I heard) on GTK-3+ 3.21.

light+love
sunweaver (who is already scared of the 3.22 GTK+ release, luckily the last development release of the GTK+ 3-series)

Preface

This little piece of work has been pending on my todo list for about two years now. For our local school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" I wrote the little tool credential-sheets. It is a little Perl script that turns a series of import files (CSV format) as they have to be provided for user mass import into GOsa² (i.e. LDAP) into a series of A4 sheets with little cards on them, containing initial user credential information.

The upstream sources are on Github and I have just uploaded this little tool to Debian.

Introduction

After mass import of user accounts (e.g. into LDAP) most site administrators have to create information sheets (or snippets) containing those new credentials (like username, password, policy of usage, etc.).

With this tiny tool, providing these pieces of information to multiple users, becomes really simple.

Introduction

NX is a software suite which implements very efficient compression of the X11 protocol. This increases performance when using X applications over a network, especially a slow one.

NX (v3) has been originally developed by NoMachine and has been Free Software ever since. Since NoMachine obsoleted NX (v3) some time back in 2013/2014, the maintenance has been continued by a versatile group of developers. The work on NX (v3) is being continued under the project name "nx-libs".

History

Until January 2015, nx-libs was more mainly a redistribution approach of the original NX (v3) software. We (we as in mainly a group of X2Go developers) kept changes applied to the original NoMachine sources as minimal as possible. We also kept the original files and folders structure. Patches had been maintained via the quilt utility on top of a Git repository, the patches had always been kept separate. That was the 3.5.0.x series of nx-libs.

In January 2015, the characteristics of nx-libs as maintained by the X2Go project between 2011 and 2015 changed.

I just did a bundle upload of all MATE 1.14 related packages to Debian unstable. Packages are currently building for the 23 architectures supported by Debian, build status can be viewed on the DDPO page of the Debian MATE Packaging Team [1]

Credits

Again a big thanks to the packaging team. Martin Wimpress again did a fabulous job in bumping all packages towards the 1.14 release series during the last weeks. During last week, I reviewed his work and uploaded all binary packages to a staging repository.

Also a big thanks to Vangelis Mouhtsis, who recently added more hardening support to all those MATE packages that do some sort of C compilation at build time.

After testing all MATE 1.14 packages on a Debian unstable system, I decided to do a bundle upload today. Packages should be falling out of the build daemons within the next couple of hours/days (depending on the architecture being built for).

GTK2 -> GTK3

The greatest change for this release of MATE to Debian is the switch over from GTK2 to GTK3.

People using the MATE desktop environment on Debian systems are invited to test the new MATE 1.14 packages and give feedback via the Debian bug tracker, esp. on the user experience regarding the switch over to GTK3.

Thanks to all who help getting MATE 1.14 in Debian better every day!!!

Known issues when running in NXv3 sessions

The Arctica Project is a task force of people reinventing the realm of remote desktop computing on Linux. One core component for multimedia experience in remote desktop / application scenarios is the to-be-reloaded / upcoming Telekinesis Framework.

Telekinesis provides a framework for developing GUI applications that have a client and server side component. Those applications are visually merged and presented to the end user in such a way that the end user's “user experience” is the same as if the user was interacting with a strictly server side application. Telekinesis mediates the communication between those server side and client side application parts.

As a reference implementation you can imagine a server side media player GUI (TeKi-aware application) and a client side video overlay (corresponding TeKi-aware service). The media player GUI "remote-controls" the client side video overlay. The video overlay receives its video stream from the server. All these interactions are mediated through Telekinesis.

A proof of concept has been developed for X2Go in 2012. For the Arctica Server, we are currently doing a (much cleaner!) rewrite of the original prototype [1]. See [2] for the first whitepaper describing how to integrate Telekinesis into existing remote desktop solutions. See [3] for a visual demonstration of the potentials of Telekinesis (still using X2Go underneath and the original Telekinesis prototype).

As already hinted in my previous blog post, here comes a short howto that explains how to test-build nxagent (v3) against a modularized X.org 7.0 source tree.

WARNING: Please note that mixing NX code and X.org code partially turns the original X.org code base into GPL-2 code. We are aware of this situation and work on moving all NXv3 related GPL-2 code into the nxagent DDX code (xserver-xorg/hw/nxagent) or--if possible--dropping it completely. The result shall be a range of patches against X.org (licensable under the same license as the respective X.org files) and a GPL-2 licensed DDX (i.e. nxagent).

How to build this project

For the Brave and Playful

$ git clone https://git.arctica-project.org/nx-X11-rebase/build.git .
$ bash populate.sh sources.lst
$ ./buildit.sh

You can find the built tree in the _install/ sub-directory.

Please note that cloning Git repositories over the https protocol can be considerably slow. If you want to speed things up, consider signing up with our GitLab server.

For Developers...

... who have registered with our GitLab server.

$ git clone git@git.arctica-project.org:nx-X11-rebase/build.git .
$ bash populate.sh sources-devs.lst
$ ./buildit.sh

You will find the built tree in the _install/ sub-directory.

This is to give a comprehensive overview on the recent progress made in NXv3 (aka nx-libs) development.

The upstream sources of nx-libs can be found at / viewed on / cloned from Github:
https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs

A great portion of the current work is sponsored by the Qindel Group [1] in Spain (QINDEL FORMACIÓN Y SERVICIOS, S.L.). Thanks for making this possible.

Planned release date: 2nd July, 2016

We aim at releasing a completely tidied up nx-libs code tree versioned 3.6.0 on July 2nd, 2016. There is still a whole bunch of work to do for this, but I am positive that we can make this release date.

Goals of our Efforts

There are basically two major goals for spending a considerable amount of time, money and energy on NXv3 hacking:

• make this beast long-term maintainable
• make it work with latest X11 desktop environments and applications

The efforts undertaken always have the various existing use cases in mind (esp. the framework of the coming-up Arctica Project, TheQVD and X2Go).

Overview on Recent Development Progress

General Code Cleanups

Making this beast maintainable means first of all: identifying code redundancies, unused code passages, etc. and remove them.

This is where we came from (NoMachine's NX 3.5.x, including nxcomp, nxcompext, nxcompshad, nx-X11 and nxagent): 1,757,743 lines of C/C++ code.

[mike@minobo nx-libs.35 (3.5.0.x)]$ cloc --match-f '.*\.(c|cpp|h)$' .
    5624 text files.