Neatx, Google's open source NX server

[openAdmin]

Last week amidst the chrome OS media circus, Google also released an open source NX server, called Neatx, for remote desktop display. NX technology was developed by NoMachine (http://www.nomachine.com/) to handle remote X Window connections and make a graphical desktop display usable over the Internet. "The good old X Window system can be used over the network, but it has issues with network latency and bandwidth. Neatx remedies some of these issues," Google engineers wrote on the company's open source blog (http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/07/releasing-neatx-open-source-nx-servier.html). There is a free implementation of an NX server based on NoMachine's libraries named FreeNX (http://freenx.berlios.de/), but this did not appeal to Google. "FreeNX's primary target is to replace the one closed component and is written in a mix of several thousand lines of Bash, Expect and C, making FreeNX difficult to maintain," according to Google. "Designed from scratch with flexibility and maintainability in mind, Neatx minimizes the number of involved processes and all code is split into several libraries." Neatx is written in Python, with a few wrapper scripts in Bash and one program written in C "for performance reasons".Google also claims Neatx implements features not found in FreeNX, like a drop-down menu for session control in rootless sessions. However, not all of FreeNX's features are implemented in Neatx.
It remains to be seen if Neatx will be the default display server for the upcoming Chrome OS. Google insists the release date was just a coincidence. Neatx features include session creation, suspension, resumption, and shutdown; support for Gnome, KDE, application, and console sessions; floating window/virtual desktop sessions; full screen, resolution, and keyboard preferences; and session shadowing
Neatx can be downloaded from Google's code repository (http://code.google.com/p/neatx/).