Comments on: Remote X sessions on Nokia 770

By: carl

carl — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 18:52:44 +0000

iv got a new nokia 770 and want to connect to my brothers bluetooth phone without him knowing iv been told it is possible but dont know how please can anyone help me thanks carl

By: Jeffgrado

Jeffgrado — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 17:21:06 +0000

I used -C but didn’t notice any difference in speed. Perhaps it only works with blowfish (which I was not using).
Very cool stuff, I was able to run firefox, even with extensions on.

By: Alejandro Rivero

Alejandro Rivero — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 03:48:02 +0000

Wonderful! I am running xine via the USB, it drops frames and it does not support sound, but I double clicked and it runs in full screen!

By: And So It Begins...

And So It Begins... — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 00:57:44 +0000

Spiffy
Well, it arrived earlier than expected. I had heard about the Nokia 770 and had a sense that it would be in popular demand (i.e., shortly unavailable after the press release). So far, so good. Built-in web browsing, secure e-mail

By: Gene Mosher

Gene Mosher — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 15:58:03 +0000

I don’t have a 770 yet so I really appreciate your willingness to try out these ideas on the 770.

A couple of points… Having data files remote to the 770 is as natural as having the apps remote to the 770. You absolutely want most of the data right where the app is running. If you don’t do that you have to pass data all over the network, and that is to be avoided. What you want over the network is to be minimized. The network should only be used to send new display info to your 770 and to pass info back to the app about how you are interacting with the display. Still, yes, there are some exceptional cases where you want some data local to the user. The primary purpose of the 770, though, is as a device to connect to the network, to serve up a rich user input experience (including voice which will be processed for command and recognition processing remotely) and to serve up a rich audio/video experience to the user (which now means all kinds of touchscreen applications).

Let me dirgress… There’s only one issue in technology which will always be an open window of opportunity and which will always remain an area where improvement is needed: the User Interface. For the first time we all literally hold this in our hands. It’s all based on free (GPL & MIT) software and it doesn’t cost us anything to participate, thanks to Richard Stallman. Nokia has built the device and, in the past week you’ve helped us all see how to readily connect to all those X apps remotely. Among the steps ahead are self-discovering icons on the 770 desktop. The 770 desktop becomes a self-discovering, self-organizing portal to remote X apps everywhere.

X is so neat because even many the people who built all those X apps generally didn’t understand that X had the ability to serve them up remotely as you have shown, and their touchscreen driven, too, without any realization of this by the app developers. So, the toolkits that have been used to build these apps weren’t designed with any thought as to how they would look on a touchscreen device like the 770. Such app development frameworks in the future will have to not only recognize this but be specialized to succeed in this new GUI context. Desktop users are looking for Open Office, yes, but all the people who don’t sit at a desk all day need other apps for the 770 - apps that haven’t been built yet. They need to be built quickly.

If you’ve browsed my web site you’ll see that this is what I’ve been up to since, probably, before you were born. I have another 30 or 40 years of work ahead of me, though, and now that the 770 I’ve been waiting for for several decades is finally here I need to change the way I go about things. Check your email in a couple of days for more about that. I’m not a programmer or sysadmin, you see. I’m a user, and I can’t respond to anyone except in that context, so if my remarks to you seem to come from a different level than you’d expect, well, that’s the reason, and it’s something I can’t avoid. This has its advantages to you, too, as I’ll soon explain. Meanwhile, just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re a key player in the next technomwenteling.

By: RealNitro's Blog

RealNitro's Blog — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 18:54:46 +0000

Remote X on Nokia 770: schreenshots
Due to the fact that the screenshot tool had a bug at the time I gave remote X windows a try on the N770, I could’t post any ‘proof’.

But, that screenshot-bug has been solved, and today I connected …

By: daf

daf — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 22:26:07 +0000

try with the command :
ssh -X user@server -c blowfish -C
-c blowfish is a protocol for ssh less secure but enough
-C is to compress data transfert
i think with that it could be ok
may be the port of ssh don’t have blowfish (you can try without)

By: RealNitro

RealNitro — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 13:54:18 +0000

@Gene Mosher
—
Another solution to the latency problem is to use a GUI that is based solely on X primitives. What this does is minimize the amount of network traffic by having the client application on the remote host only have to send instructions over the network to the X terminal as to what kind of display screen needs to be drawn. This avoids sending all the pixel information.
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Where can I find some more information on this?

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If and when you establish an icon on the 770’s display that contains the command to connect to a specific client application (which implies that it’s remote) you may have to also indicate that it is to leave the terminal window open.
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I don’t think it will be necessary to leave the terminal open (or open it in the first place).

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In fact, when a 770 user can launch a remote app with the touch of an icon and doesn’t even have to know where the app is located then the 770 will have achieved a new standard in the ease of use and in usefulness.
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Even if the ‘bugs’ I encountered get solved, those remote apps will not be able to open any files on your device. The windows really run on the server, so they can only open files that are on the server aswell.

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Since I don’t have my 770 yet perhaps you can take the step of creating such an icon on the 770, one that launches a secure window on a remote app.
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I’ll give it a try.

By: Ikke

Ikke — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 11:24:24 +0000

I guess the gedit typing problem is there because what you display are no GTK+ widgets, but plain X11 shapes. This way the platform can’t “know” you’re inside a GtkTextEntry, or one of it’s descendants (assuming Maemo’s GTK+ is patched somehow to tell the platform to display the keyboard widget when a GtkTextEntry got focus).

You could try using Dasher

By: Gene Mosher

Gene Mosher — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 22:13:20 +0000

I forgot to mention one thing. If and when you establish an icon on the 770’s display that contains the command to connect to a specific client application (which implies that it’s remote) you may have to also indicate that it is to leave the terminal window open. The display you open is displayed in a terminal window and you can be connected to two or more client apps at once - each one is served up in its own terminal window.

It is easy for a client app to present itself in a full-screen mode and without the window header at the top, too. In such a case the 770 user can literally have no idea that the application driving the GUI is somewhere else. In fact, when a 770 user can launch a remote app with the touch of an icon and doesn’t even have to know where the app is located then the 770 will have achieved a new standard in the ease of use and in usefulness.
Since I don’t have my 770 yet perhaps you can take the step of creating such an icon on the 770, one that launches a secure window on a remote app.