[bmuki]

It occurred to me that with the introduction of Fast User Switching and the existing Remote Desktop, the foundations are almost in place for a remote Aqua access.

By this I mean, imagine I take my slow iBook and log into my fast Power Macintosh using remote Aqua access. Then the software that I run, would really run on the Power Macintosh but be displayed on the iBook. It would be as if I had a superfast iBook.

This is not new. Most aren't used to the Unix world where this is the norm. In the old days, you'd log into a Unix server with a bare bones terminal and run X11 software off a server, using the server's expensive hardware.

I believe remote Aqua is not far away. Right now, many users can be logged into 10.3 but only one screen is shown. Why can't Remote Desktop be adapted to log into an account that isn't shown? I believe this will all be integrated at the OS level so that no seperate packages like Remote Desktop will be necessary.

Sound is a concern. I don't think any remote log in services ever implemented routed sound. But Apple has a way of doing things right... does anyone know if Remote Desktop currently has sound implemented?

Wishful thinking?

[phantomac]

Shouldn't be too hard to do, since NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP already had it.

[Xestrel]

Think massive network latency... Unless they do it in some intelligent manner, it's probably going to rquire a lot of network bandwidth. You can use VLC to get an idea of what this would be like - it's a program which basically forwards mouse/keyboard commands to the server and send bitmaps of the display on the server to the client. This isn't terribly fast, because it takes a while to send that much graphic data in real time. In practice, the speed is tolerable on a local network, but downright sluggish over a typical high-speed internet connection.

In the unix world, X-Windows pulls this off because the drawing protocol for X was really "light" - vectors, line and text drawing. The server would forward simple drawing commands and the client would draw it.And for most old X-programs, the interfaces were graphically simple so it would work okay even with a slow network connection. Seems to me that while quartz seems capable of this (sending vector drawing commands), the sophistication of most graphic objects in OS X would swiftly elminate any gains one would get by sending vector drawing commands (imagine vector drawing commands for displaying a bit-map - it would actually be worse than sending the bitmap directly.)

Having said that, I'm not saying it's not possible for apple to pull this off in a clever way, but it seems like they're going to run into bandwidth problems unless they come up with some kind of clever window-manager client. Does anyone know how apple remote desktop works? I've never actually used it and always assumed it was similar to VLC of timbuktu.

[bmuki]

A quick search in the forums show Remote Desktop to already be slow. One person said he was surprised to find Apple's slower than Microsoft's. It was not clear if they were referring to going across the internet or to local connections.

From Unix, we know speeds are acceptable. You can scroll an Adobe PDF file pretty fast. Web browsers are just as fast. So, I'm curious if it's just Apple. ie, is playing Doom across a local Unix network feasible?

[mbryda]

MS RDC (Remote Desktop) does it fime with low bandwidth connections. I've had it running on a 14.4k cellpphone modem (high latentcy) @ 640x480, and while it was slow, it was usable for the basics.

Have even had it running on a 33.6 dialup @ 800x600, which was quite usable.

Also, Citrix scales well down to slow linespeeds.

However, VNC is a dog, even at 100MBPS on a local LAN. Not sure why, but the other technologies can do it well.

I wonder how Apple Remote Desktop works across WANs?

[Morenix]

By this I mean, imagine I take my slow iBook and log into my fast Power Macintosh using remote Aqua access. Then the software that I run, would really run on the Power Macintosh but be displayed on the iBook. It would be as if I had a superfast

...

i do that with my slow powerbook 800 and my blazing fast AMD XP2.1+ with the Microsoft RDC application for mac.

[trusted_content]

I'm not sure now NeXTStep managed display forwarding, but my guess is that the remote machine probably sent PostScript commands, which were rendered by the Display Postscript engine on the client.

If this were rewritten for Quartz, it's a possibility.

[Brass]

Originally posted by mbryda:
However, VNC is a dog, even at 100MBPS on a local LAN. Not sure why, but the other technologies can do it well.

The answer to this is simple...

VNC uses a completely different methodology to the other systems, for completely different reasons. While Apple's, Microsoft's, and X11's system all use Vector-based and instructional based methods (eg, draw a window of this size at this location), VNC simply sends a bitmapped image of the area that needs updating (ie, every pixel, but compressed).

So VNC cannot possibly work anywhere near the speed of the other systems.

The advantage of VNC is that it is so much more flexible that the other systems in other ways. Ie, it is an open standard, and completely cross platform (not just Mac/Windows, but any type of Unix, BeOS, Amiga... anything). It can also be used for much more than remote view/control. I use it to share a keyboard and mouse between three computers (Win2000, Solaris 8 & Mac OS X). I just drag the mouse across all three screens... it's great!

Additionally, the VNC client is so small that you can have the Unix, Mac OS and Windows clients all on one tiny floppy disk, and carry it with you so you can use it anywhere.

Oh yes, VNC is also free.