Guacamole is an HTML5 + JavaScript (AJAX) viewer for VNC | Hacker News Reader

Guacamole is an HTML5 + JavaScript (AJAX) viewer for VNC

guacamole.sourceforge.net

102 pointskordless11 comments

This is ridiculously awesome.

I had a laptop die on me while traveling in South America this winter, and spent a month developing through Remote Desktop from internet cafes to one of our servers back in the US. It involved configuring a VPN on a sketchy box to pull off, but at least it got me running the IDE.

If I'd had this set up, it would have cut out pretty much all the pain from that scenario. In fact, it would make a good case for simply leaving the laptop sitting in the cage at the datacenter, so as to have it available to work on, but unavailable for nightbus thieves.

It will be cool if individual applications can be exposed via VNC and each mapped to its own URI. We can see some seriously interactive apps (maybe killing Flash at the same time!)

That can be huge for virtualizing legacy applications. A few months ago I was going to build a similar web app, but with X11 (legacy X sucks, but XRender is better than VNC for this IMO), and with the virtualization/"web-enabling" back-end infrastructure to use for an application at work. That didn't pan out, but I think making an easy to use, easy to manage web-app virtualization backend is a big opportunity. Having this VNC client available provides the web-browser half of the solution. I have a few hours a week available, anyone want to work on this idea together?

You just about described Skytap Cloud to a 'T'. Although, it does do a lot more than just that. Check it out at http://skytap.com.

(note: i was their sr. program manager and primary ui developer from 2007-2009).

That goes way beyond my idea, which would make sense, since the Skytap target market is a lot larger and more profitable than what I was thinking of. Kudos to them. I'd like to hear more about how they got started - are there any articles or interviews you can recommend?

Sure thing:

Series A, stealth mode:

http://www.npost.com/blog/2007/06/04/interview-with-david-ri...

http://www.nwinnovation.com/interview_with_steve_brodie,_ill...

http://www.seattlepi.com/business/327068_illumita10.html

Launch:

http://virtualization.com/news/2008/04/10/illumita-renames-i...

Series B:

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/03/16/cloud-computing-fir...

http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/03/Skytap_taps_7_milli...

Regarding the founders: Dave Richardson went back to school to finish his Ph.D. Hank Levy is now the Chair of the Computer Science department at U of Washington. Brian Bershad is now the Site Director for Google in Seattle.

Cool. Thanks for the links!

Anyone try it on an iPad?

This would be great for KVM server consoles!

not sure how solid this is, but it's a wicked awesome concept.

does compviz work?

can i remote into a windows machine? can i remote into a windows machine running IE to do IE6/7/8 testing?

Well, presumably you can connect to anything with a VNC server attached.

I'm skeptical that the client would be fast enough for Compiz to work reasonably, but you should be able to use VNC on a thing running Compiz -- the effects will just be choppy and useless and probably annoying. It might be fast enough I guess, but you'd need a fast connection anyway, probably something local.

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