James Hooker

Jim,

So essentially you want to base this on a Citrix-type environment? It’s a very good idea with it being usable on nearly any Internet enabled device, whether that be a MID, phone, laptop, even ipod or other PMP…heck, potentially set top boxes and TVs. The leg power would be all server side, so the client shouldn’t need much power. But it would require a lot of server power. The size of some of these farms that even medium sized companies use can be pretty huge.

I’d love to see this, and see it work on any platform and OS.

Lets make it happen.

iAndy

Yes, i definately have some thoughts. I think you should pay less attention to such complicated things and more attention on other things…..you know exactly what I mean xxx

In a way this can already be done, although probably on a limited scale per server. If you have NoMachine’s NX server, you can use their Java-based client in a browser to access the server desktop.

Yes

This is a good idea, and should not take much work to do. However, relying on a VM for each session would be extremely expensive on a server. We would wind up with the same limitations that Citrix has; about 50 users per server, max.

I would rather see something much lighter than Xen or some other type of VM utilized to do this. Why not use something similar to Session Management; where the apps are available in a pool of possible applications and pass only keystrokes back to the application pool?

In other words, use something similar to a Java Server to act as a communication conduit. The screen is display per session management (more like remoteX) and then create several applications in a single pool of apps. Then, the user sees the XApplication on their screen, but does directly interact with it. Ketsrokes and mouse movements are recorded as X/Y coordinates and keystrokes are captured through the Servlet or socket connection. This way, the application pool creates the apps, the network traffic is light, and if a limited number of applications are needed or required, they are pooled.

Of course the difficulty comes in which screen which user is accessing. That would be the tricky part. You would need some screen scraper to pull just the screen the current user (session) is using and put this into some type of session cache. This would have to be replayed to the actual application functionality before an actual commit occurs. Hmmm, brings up some interesting concepts.

If the Linux players did develop something like this that was extremely lightweight and not so taxing on server resources, it may swing the Linux Desktop in favor of Windows and Mac. Can you imagine serving 100’s of users per cheap Linux server, with fast response times by embedding applications within a browser? Would be big, no doubt.

At UDS in Prage we discussed a “dot mac like” service for Ubuntu users. Canonical are planning such a service right now.

Well, to sum up my opinion, I think that we have a better product called eyeOS (www.eyeos.org) that have an entire development platform to create right applications. The only lack of this project is the community that just are growing.

So, take a look and you’ll see that have a mobil.me with eyeOS is close

The technology is out there just has not been brought together yet.
Some options are :-

* http://www.go-pc.net which is a virtual pc using NoMachines NX Server.

* http://www.eyeos.org is a virtual desktop in a browser written in PHP you can even have your docs opened in zoho writer so can edit and save docs plus there is a sync tool which uploads any changed docs from your desktop to your eyeos desktop. Also can integrate openoffice running inside browser.

* Use Google Docs or http://www.zoho.com. http://www.box.net allows you to upload docs and edit online using zoho they offer a 1Gb account for free not sure if this includes ability to edit docs online though.

Wow, I’d love to see what Canonical are brewing over there then.

Actually you can use mobileme with Ubuntu firefox. When you get the message window saying which browsers are supported just click continue and you will get the mobileme login page, just enter your user name and password. You can read, send email, calender, address book, but haven’t checked idisk yet. The only thing is that when composing an email, with using address book button to add addresses, the pop-up window is not rendered correctly. So, when composing an email, go to address book first, find the person, and click on their email, and the compose windows will pop-up.