sunweaver's NET

I recently got in contact with Nicolas Arenas Alonso and Nito Martinez from the Quindel group (located in Spain) [1].

Those guys bring forth a software product called TheQVD (The Quality Virtual Desktop) [2]. The project does similar things that X2Go does. In fact, they use NX 3.5 from NoMachine internally like we do in X2Go. Already a year ago, I noticed their activity on TheQVD and thought.. "Ahaaa!?!".

Now, a couple of weeks back we received a patch for libxcomp3 that fixes an FTBFS (fails to build from source) for nx-libs-lite against Android [3].

On May 21st 2014, the two Mikes (Gabriel|DePaulo) from the X2Go core developer team were interviewed about X2Go by the famous Randal L. Schwartz (merlyn) and equally famous Randi Harper (freebsdgirl) on the FLOSS Weekly Netcast [1].

If you're having trouble watching the embedded video on that page, try one of the below alternatives:

HD Video [2]
SD Video, large [3]
SD Video, small [4]
Audio only [5]

light+love,
Mike

[1] http://twit.tv/floss295

Yesterday, I (with my X2Go upstream hat on) have added a new (long waited for) feature to PyHoca-GUI / Python X2Go.

So far, in PyHoca-GUI (python-x2go) it was only possible to use passphrase-protected / encrypted SSH keys via an ssh-agent process that unlocks those keys when being added to the agent's keyring previous to logging into an X2Go Server.

Unlocking those keys natively in PyHoca-GUI was not possible so far.
-> Now it is!!!

This feature will be available with PyHoca-GUI 0.4.0.9 / Python X2Go 0.4.0.9 (and PyHoca-CLI 0.4.0.3).

For the Danish company Fleten.net [1] (with my X2Go [2] developer hat on) I have recently developed X2Go integration into the Unity Greeter [3] theme of LightDM [4] in Ubuntu. Fleten.net--as a Canonical Partner--is providing FOSS based IT-services to schools and municipalities in Denmark and Norway, based on Ubuntu and X2Go.

Today's quest: move 40GiB of disk space (a logical volume used as a virtual machine's file space) over 100MBit/s network infrastructure from one server machine to another.

Over 100MBit/s network the average speed of the network stream is ~ 10MByte per second. So this leads to:

• 100MByte -- 10secs
• 1.000MByte -- 100secs
• 40.000MByte -- 4000secs (i.e. 67 minutes)

How can this be sped up?

On the target host (this command set has to issued first):

In Octobre 2012, I visited UES (Ubuntu Enterprise Summit) 2012.10 in Copenhagen. Amongst other new features in Ubuntu 12.10 the new UCCS service at Canonical got introduced.

UCCS is a session broker[1] (as of Ubuntu 12.10 for RDP fullscreen sessions only) that provides login / session information to LightDM. In Quantal, the user can select a Remote Login Session as login option.

[1] https://uccs.landscape.canonical.com/

How UCCS works together with LightDM

As a proof-of-concept I have provided some packages ([1], [2]) that can be installed on Ubuntu 12.10 and allow hi-jacking of the (new) RDP remote login feature in Ubuntu 12.10 with X2Go.

[1] http://code.x2go.org/gitweb?p=lightdm-remote-session-x2go.git;a=summary
[2] http://code.x2go.org/gitweb?p=libpam-x2go.git;a=summary

The following simple steps have to be followed, to do the hi-jacking...

X2Go Server (Ubuntu precise):

 $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:x2go/stable
 $ sudo apt-get update
 $ sudo apt-get install x2goserver-xsession

As part of the process of becoming a Debian Developer, I have set up this blog to document some of my Debian (and other FOSS) activities and ideas in public.

In Octobre 2012, I have been granted Debian Maintainer status. As of today I am in the middle of the NM process, a quality assertion of Debian for people who want to become a Member of Debian (i.e. reach Debian Developer status).

So, saying hello world with this first blog post...

light+love
sunweaver