Neatx, a new open source NX server from Google

Google has released Neatx, a remote desktop server based around the NX protocol. NX improves connections between remote X Window systems and their servers by compressing the information passed between client and server. NoMachine, the original developers of the NX protocol, released most of its NX product under the GPL in 2003, but kept the NX Server component closed.

A free implementation, FreeNX, was published in 2004 by Fabien Franz, but the Google developers considered the mixture of BASH scripts, Expect and C code difficult to maintain and have therefore released Neatx, their own proof-of-concept implementation of an NX server.

Neatx has been completely rewritten and implemented mostly in Python, although the developers do wrap some BASH scripts and there is one program written in C. Neatx also incorporates some code from another Google project, Ganeti, a virtual server management tool for Xen, KVM and other virtualisation tools. While offering some features not in FreeNX (such as a drop down menu for session control), the developers say not all FreeNX's features are implemented in NeatX and there are still issues with the code.

The Neatx project is available to download at the project's Google Code page and is licensed under the GPL version 2.

(djwm)