NX technology

NX technology, developed by NoMachine, and commonly known as 'NX' is a proprietary computer program that provides hosted desktop and remote access. It consists of a suite of NoMachine software products related to desktop virtualization and application delivery for server-based computing and cloud-based environments.

It is available as a free version for personal remote access use and also as a comprehensive range of products for commercial use which allow the individuals of an enterprise to work and collaborate remotely regardless of device or network.

The software can be installed on Windows, Mac, Linux and Linux ARM, with connecting clients available for Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, Linux, Linux ARM and HTML/JavaScript permitting access from any device or computer. Its features include sharing network devices, session recording, file transfer, multi-media capability and browser-based access.

The enterprise-oriented server products available additionally offer multi-node clustering and failover functionality as well as the ability to run multiple virtual Linux instances on the same machine (Linux Terminal Server functionality).

The integration of VirtualGL means high-end OpenGL-based X applications and 3-D CAD programs are rendered and displayed with the best possible accuracy.

NX, or NoMachine as it is often referred to since the release of version 4, is environment-agnostic in that it operates with any physical, virtualized or in the cloud infrastructures meaning that it can be installed on Linux, Windows and Mac instances virtualised on top of popular hypervisors like Xen, KVM or VMware or integrated with any Virtual Desktop Infrastructure running in private or public clouds, such as Amazon EC2 or Rackspace.

In 2001, the compression and transport protocol NX was created to improve on the performance of the native X display protocol to the point that it could be usable over a slow link such as a dial-up modem. It wrapped remote connections in SSH sessions for encryption. The NX scheme was derived from that of DXPC – the Differential X Protocol Compressor project. NX 1.x was released to the general public on February 14th 2003, the final version of 'NX' being 3.5 of which the last update was in 2012. The core compression technology up until NX 3.5 was made available to the community under the GNU GPL2 license whilst other components such as the NX Server and NX Client programs were proprietary.