Remote desktop browsing and virtualization are all the buzz words now with much of the stage light taken by Cloud Computing now. If you have ever tried to use any remote desktop access software then you must be familiar with X Window which provided GUI for networked computers and was among the first ones in the commercial virtualization services market. But it had problems: Network latency time and of course the network cost as a result of that.

Then came NoMachine but it was not open source meaning you could not build your applications on it and cannot customize it. You have to use what they gave you to use.

Last week, Google announced Neatx which is an open source implementation of the NX server.

This is what the official release on Google’s OpenSource blog said:

Designed from scratch with flexibility and maintainability in mind, Neatx minimizes the number of involved processes and all code is split into several libraries. It is written in Python, with the exception of very few wrapper scripts in BASH and one program written in C for performance reasons. Neatx was also able to reuse some code from another Google Open Source project, Ganeti. The code still has some issues, but we’re confident interested developers will be able to fix them.

You can also see the presentation given by Michael Hanselmann on Implementation and Use of Virtual Workstations