Hey, I've took a more detailed look at NoMachine NX and wrote down some details:

http://www.gnome.org/~markmc/a-look-at-nomachine-nx.html

Now, to figure out how we might go about using this for Terminal Services in Fedora.

My first guess is that only nxcomp, nxcompext, nxproxy, nxagent and nx-X11 are interesting in this context. We could probably build a package that includes all these pieces, but builds the nx-X11 package using a patch against Xorg rather than using the entire copy of XFree86 4.30 (i.e. the way vnc is built). Anyone interested in taking this on?

Once we have the package in place, its not immediately obvious to me the best way to actually integrate it so that it can be easily used nicely for terminal services. The problem here is that you want to somehow, from the client terminal, activate an nxagent on the server, get GDM to manage that display and then start an rfbproxy on the client which displays to the local X server.

The way this is done with the NoMachine pacakges is, AFAICS, through nxclient using SSH to invoke to their proprietary nxnode/nxserver commands on the server which does this kind of setup. We could possibly take the same approach requiring the terminal server to have the SSH host key of each the client machines to allow the clients to run an nxagent. It'd be really nice to see someone try something like this out...

However, since one of the reasons NX is interesting is its potential for implementing the session re-connection/mobility feature it might make more sense to take a similar approach to the one we took for VNC - dedicate a port for NX connections, when GDM gets an incoming connection on that port spawn an nxagent with a login screen, keep track of NX sessions and allow re-connections.

Anyway, purposely leaving this hanging for now. Hopefully either someone will take a further poke at this now or we'll re-visit it again sometime in the future.

(Oh, one question I forgot is whether or not NX is really interesting for terminal services. Low bandwidth requirements might only really come to the fore for things like connecting to your office machine from home or a sysadmin in the head office administering a desktop in a branch office. So, on a fast local network does NX really noticeably improve the usability of an X terminal?)

Thanks, Mark.