Hi,

I was wondering if we can have a linux box on a network at one end with all the packages which service the KDE installed but the desktop environment (the parts that the user directly interacts with-> UI front end) actually be installed on a remote machine and display the UI there.

Advantages:
The server does not have to do any of the processing it does not need to do. If it is not going to display anything directly, it should just run the processes that are going to support the desktop environment in the remote location.
The remote location can, based on the hardware support for features, adjust the display to be optimum, in turn providing a better user experience.

Im not really talking about stuff like the vnc viewer and remote desktop because there the screen is rendered on the host machine before it is sent across the network.

An illustrative use case could be ...
I have my linux box on my home server and have the KDE front end installed on a mobile phone and on a laptop. I want to be able to log on to the server and be able to work with either. Irrespective of where the front end is, mobile phone or laptop, I would want an appropriate ui for the form factor of the device Im using while all the processes run on the home server.

The only X forwarder that I know of that works that way is NOMAD and that's still under development.

Thanks for the reply Zarin.
Yes, NOMAD does seem to work the way I was talking about. However, it seems to be openSUSE specific. Moreover, it seems to me that the objective of that project is to provide an experience similar to that of remote desktop of Windows.

However, I was looking at a cross-platform application, and something that worked differently as compared to the remote desktop feature of windows.

Lets say, for example, I have 3 boxes, 1 with BSD, one with ubuntu and one with Windows.
And i have a laptop. I have the KDE front end running on the laptop and the individual back ends on each of the remote machines. Now if I switch from 1 machine to another on the laptop, the UI should not change. Only the remote machine servicing the front end should change. Also, the remote server should not be aware of what the UI looks like, even though it knows what the state of the UI is.

I think this would be a useful feature for KDE.

This would requre massive internal restructuring of KDE applications. You would be better off using Shared folders such as SSHFS to share configurations among KDE systems.

If I read what you are saying correctly what you are suggesting is currently a technological impossibility. The closest you could get to it is if Qt or another toolkit added proxy support and even then it would only work for applications that use that specific toolkit, not all of them. If two more more toolkits implement it and want to work with each other a standard would need to be decided upon.

That makes sense...
Thanks

Have a look at NoMachine's NX technology http://nomachine.com/

Cheers,
_

Seems to be interesting...
will look into it... Thanks