Re: nxlaunch: A new GTK NX client

[Seb James <seb esfnet co uk>]

On Mon, 2007-09-24 at 00:04 +0200, Jaap Haitsma wrote:
> On 9/23/07, Josselin Mouette <joss debian org> wrote:
> > Le lundi 17 septembre 2007 à 16:26 +0100, Seb James a écrit :
> > > Heads up for those interested in remote desktop connections:
> > >
> > > I just committed a GTK NX client called nxlaunch to the freenx svn
> > > repository at berlios:
> >
> > This sounds quite interesting, but I would have loved to see this work
> > integrated in tsclient instead - unless you are also planning to
> > integrate XDMCP and RDP functionality.
> >
> Or even  better vinagre [1] , which is a nice GNOME UI compliant vncviewer

Hi Josselin and Jaap,

I was aware of vinagre and tsclient. That's why I designed my NX client
in two pieces. One is the core program which actually negotiates the
connection and leads to a window being created on the screen. This is
called nxcl, also available from the berlios svn repo.

nxcl has a dbus api for a frontend client to communicate settings to it.
You set up the connection (gnome/kde, IP address, username etc) in the
frontend, storing it for future use using any means you like (nxlaunch
uses an XML file for that). You then send those settings in dbus signals
to nxcl (which you have to fork and exec) which actually launches your
NX window. nxcl depends only on libdbus-1, libstdc++, glibc and a couple
of X libs (it's written in C++) and the total size of the code (.so file
plus binary) is about 160 kbytes.

That means it should be easy to integrate NX support into both tsclient
and vinagre!

The one thing that is missing is notification of the X window ID of the
NX window that gets created. I have logged a feature request with
NoMachine to place that into the libXproxy, nxssh and nxproxy programs.
Without the X window ID, it's hard to take the new NX session and, say,
stick it in a tab of sessions, or otherwise manipulate it.

regards,

Seb

p.s. I made a mistake choosing the nxlaunch name - it was already in use
for a scripted cmd line NX session launcher. For this reason I will
shortly be renaming nxlaunch, but the library will still have the name
nxcl.