Monday, November 05, 2012

Finally For Real, Lunch With A Side Of GNOME

Over a year ago I took a screenshot with an iPad running GNOME remotely.  This preview test with NX 4 connected but was far too slow to use for work.  It was a milestone, but not really anything that we could deploy. 

In the last week I have been testing OpenText Exceed On Demand which is a similar product that supports iPad.  After testing on a VM, I moved it to the production machine and had some firewall rules written to allow me to test it from the outside.  Inside the building, VNC offers a similar presentation; but the Achilles Heel has always been getting it to work over low bandwidth and the Internet.  I was eating lunch today when I got word the firewall rule was finished.  So I connected first over the WiFi of the restaurant and things worked greatly, nearly as fast as it does back at City Hall.  I then dropped off the WiFi and enabled AT&T 3G and connected again.  Once again it worked like a champ.  This software works like other compression software; once you get to a certain threshold it seems to just work with very little difference of speed.



We're discussing options and suitability right now.   The licensing and cost is higher on this product than other similar products, so possibly we'll use it only for iPads and continue to use NX for all other devices.  The next step is to get it out to users and see how it works.  From my perspective, I'm pleased with the performance. 

Proof of AT&T 3G: :)    The shot below shows that it really connected and works.


Other projects: Work continues on the Ubuntu workstation build, testing with users; starting to install OpenLDAP on a VM to try and work it into our network; trying to advance email and document management solutions.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Should just've set up a Sun Ray server, that supports Linux, Windows and Solaris desktops and they've had an iPad client for ages :)