sunweaver's NET

This is to announce a new upcoming FLOSS project addressing the remote (desktop) computing realm in the GNU/Linux (and possibly other *nices) server world.

The new project's name will be The Arctica Project [1, 2].

In the Arctica Project, 5-6 developers from all over the world have come together to revisit the field of remote (desktop) computing and write a remote computing framework from scratch.

At the moment, there are not many solutions around that (a) are 100% Free Software, (b) work acceptable for most users and (c) also address large scale deployments and enterprise grade customers. To be honest, IMHO there is actually no such solution at all.

The Arctica Project attempts at changing this sustainably; and we are starting with it NOW.

If anyone reads this and gets curious, please join us on IRC and get in touch! If you feel like a potential contributor, we happily invite you to become one. We are open to your input. Please share it. (Thanks!)

light+love,
Mike

[1] https://github.com/ArcticaProject
[2] IRC channel #arctica on Freenode

Dear X2Go Community, dear friends,

as many of you may know, I have been contributing a considerable amount
of time to upstream-maintaining X2Go over the past 4 years. I provided
new X2Go components (Python X2Go, PyHoca X2Go Client, a publicly
available X2Go Session Broker, X2Go MATE Bindings, etc.) and focused on
making X2Go a wide-spread community project. For the last 2-3 years I
have been in the role of the X2Go project coordinator and various other
roles.

With the beginning of 2015, I will pass on several of those roles to
other people in the project, see the below list for already assigned and
unassigned roles:

• project/community coordinator (continued by Stefan Baur)
• development coordination (continued by Heinz-Markus Graesing,
  very probably introducing some sort of agile development)
• release management (n.n.)
• i18n team leader (n.n.)
• package maintenance (continued by Oleksandr Shneyder)
• Git administrator (continued by Mihai Moldovan)
• bug tracker administrator (continued by Michael DePaulo)

The reasons for tremendously reducing my workload on X2Go are these:

• more time for development, less involvement in organizational tasks
• more time for paid/contracted work (also in the X2Go context)
• spend some of my time on doing Remote Desktop Computing research
• be more available to Debian and Ubuntu as a package maintainer
• be more available to my family

In several internal exchanges we (Heinz, Stefan, Mihai, Mike#2,

TL;DR; Those of you who are not able to join "X2Go: The Gathering 2014"... Join us on IRC (#x2go on Freenode) over the coming weekend. We will provide information, URLs to our TinyPads, etc. there. Spontaneous visitors are welcome during the working sessions (please let us know if you plan to come around), but we don't have spare beds anymore for accomodation. (We are still trying hard to set up some sort of video coverage--may it be life streaming or recorded sessions, this is still open, people who can offer help, see below).

Our event "X2Go: The Gathering 2014" is approaching quickly. We will meet with a group of 13-15 people (number of people is still slightly fluctuating) at Linux Hotel, Essen. Thanks to the generous offerings of the Linux Hotel [1] to FLOSS community projects, costs of food and accommodation could be kept really low and affordable to many people.

We are very happy that people from outside Germany are coming to that meeting (Michael DePaulo from the U.S., Kjetil Fleten (http://fleten.net) from Denmark / Norway). And we are also proud that Martin Wimpress (Mr. Ubuntu MATE Remix) will join our gathering.

In advance, I want to send a big THANK YOU to all people who will sponsor our weekend, either by sending gift items, covering travel expenses or providing help and knowledge to make this event a success for the X2Go project and its community around.

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