Exploring Red Hat’s flavor enhancer for virtual desktops
Well Seasoned
Red Hat peps up performance of multimedia applications on remote desktops with SPICE (Simple Protocol For Independent Computing Environments).
Linux provides many protocols and implementations that allow remote access to the graphical interfaces of other computers. The networking capability of X Window, for example, is legendary and makes every Linux or Unix machine into a potential terminal server. It used to be enough for a remote desktop solution to transfer the GUI over the network, but users and admins today have much more sophisticated needs. Modern scenarios demand access to the hardware, and all data transfers between server and client must be secure. Increasingly, mobile users want to interrupt sessions and later resume them on a different computer.
Protocols and software, such as Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) or NoMachine’s NX master all these challenges without problems; however, when it comes to multimedia, they lag far behind the performance of a locally installed desktop.
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