Xpra is screen for X applications | Hacker News Reader

Xpra is screen for X applications

code.google.com

85 pointsrwolf15 comments

Mmmm.. ec2 instance running X+Xpra+FreeNX Server, then NX on the client and you have your desktop anywhere.

(X on EC2: http://blog.decaresystems.ie/index.php/2007/05/23/amazon-web...)

Hmm, this actually works just fine for me with only NX client. What advantage does Xpra bring to the table?

Or just Xpra, for that matter--- Xpra was written as a replacement for NX (http://lwn.net/Articles/343389/), and they have heavily overlapping functionality, so it seems odd to use both rather than picking one.

Does Xpra offer the same level of compression as NX?

NX is designed to work fast over low bandwidth connections.

It doesn't look like it. If you need a remote desktop, NX is the way to go, in my opinion. However, I do use Xpra for long-running programs because I don't want to have a full-blown X server running all the time.

I used Xpra today to run a small console program on my headless server, and I attached to it from my laptop. It worked very well, until I changed my ssh port to some nonstandard one. Bye-bye, attach functionality...

Does anyone know of a way to specify the ssh port?

http://www.mail-archive.com/parti-discuss@partiwm.org/msg002... seems to indicate there is no current way to specify nonstandard ssh port.

Ah, too bad :/ Thanks for the info!

See http://shifter.devloop.org.uk/ if you want to connect to a *nix/BSD box from Windows with Xpra (cygwin doesn't have an Xpra package)

I use Xpra, but it's a little buggy. E.g., buttons don't always appear in the right position within a dialog. Sometimes it hangs up and I have to restart it. Some fairly complex apps don't like to run under it (I think I had this problem with IntelliJ IDEA, which also isn't entirely happy under VNC/twm). Also, running XEmacs under Xpra is a bit slow for some reason.

I use VNC day in and day out, and Xpra has not replaced VNC for me, though I originally thought it might. The rootless model is cool.

Something similar, with Telepathy: http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/134350.html

How is this different from simply using NX?

check the "What about NX?" at xpra-faq [ http://code.google.com/p/partiwm/source/browse/README.xpra ]

Wow is using NX without a commercial license really that painful? We use it at work amd it's great; much snappier than VNC.

Xpra sounds great but I'm concerned about the lack of support for various features, and -judgung from the FAQ- the author's perception that they're not important.

Yeah, the open-source version of NX isn't really ready to run; it's just a GPL'd library of the core functionality. The FreeNX project produced a working, distributable version (http://freenx.berlios.de/), but it seems to have lost steam--- no releases since 2008. There's also a reimplemented version from Google, though it's not actively developed anymore either: http://code.google.com/p/neatx/

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