"Chad C. Walstrom" <chewie at wookimus.net> wrote:
>
> [...] The people at AT&T Bell Laboratories felt that X was a bit fat
> for pushing down narrow network connections -- they were right -- and
> that there had to be a better way to display a remote desktop.  And
> there's the key difference: remote v.s. local.

Actually, X is a pretty low-bandwidth protocol.  The problem is that it
requires a very low-latency link to be very useful.

There's a program called mlview-dxpc that will cache information locally
at the client and server so many of the latency problems go away, and it
allows X to work pretty well even on modem links..

  Thanks to aggressive message caching and many other optimizations,
  the overall compression ratio can go from 10:1 to 400:1.  An
  average session, browsing the Internet, handling e-mails and
  coding in C++ results in a fairly satisfactory 60:1, with bitrates
  in the order of 2/4 KB per second.  Most important, mlview-dxpc
  leverages the existing Xnest X agent to cut network round-trips to
  zero

...from http://www.medialogic.it/projects/mlview/

The program is pretty rough around the edges.  It was a bit of a pain to
set up the last time I checked, though I know many folks were interested
in integrating it with ssh/sshd, so it's possible that it will become a
transparent enhancement at some point.

-- 
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[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]
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