I can't believe nobody's spreading the news! LXF 85 is available at the newsstands since Sep. 21 (in Britain), and it was sent to subscribers about one week earlier (I received mine today).

Something new (and more than NOTHING) is publicly known to the readers of LXF, and absolutely n-o-b-o-d-y said a word on it!

The Ulteo coverage (pp. 60-63) starts with two pages of babbling. Then...


«Understandably, Duval is keeping his cards very close to his chest, but you can't fail to notice that in the screenshot he sent us, Ulteo is running inside a web browser. What's more, the screenshot also shows Duval creating a presentation on the 'Ulteo Connected Desktop'. Ulteo is going to be hosted on Duval's own servers, enabling users to connect to their own desktop from anywhere in the world. [...] The system administration and upgrades will be handled at the server end, as too will application installation. [...] Anyone with a browser will be able to use Ulteo — indeed, Ulteo is going to need a broadband connection to work — as the client will only require Java. [...] It's unclear whether Ulteo will use either a thin client or a custom front-end to a virtual machine. [...] It could then use something like Xen for the virtual machine back-end, and NoMachine's ultraefficient NX protocol for piping the desktop to the Java client running in your web browser.»

On Jun. 08, my first guess on Ulteo was that a similar concept could use a FreeNX client to connect the user to his remote desktop, running under Xen! (Gee, I'm better than John C. Dvorak ;-)

Now, Gaël Duval reveals to Graham Morrison at LXF that the concept is actually simpler for the user: the end-user client is a Java applet in the browser! Any remote desktop client, using no matter what protocol (FreeNX, TightVNC, Tsclient, grdesktop, Krdc, etc.), would still run on the server side, then pipe the output via a broadband connection to the Java applet in your browser.

To me, this is the worst idea since the first Gulf War, because this is still raising a lot of questions:

• You will still need an OS to run that browser. If it's not Windows or MacOS X, what Linux (or BSD) will it be? And, once the user has an OS, why the need to spoil a broadband just to run your favorite applications on Duval's servers?
• How many people can benefit from a broadband connection? How much bandwidth will be lost because of unnecessary traffic by everybody doing everything remotely? (Not on the LAN!)
• Who's gonna support Duval for the necessary investments to run those servers? Duval is not Yahoo!, to have large server farms. Duval is not Mark Shuttleworth, to afford paying for his extravagances. Generally speaking, Duval was the guy with the technical ideas, not the Chief Financial Officer.
• Also generally speaking, why does Duval believe that people would want to do this? Maybe not everyone wants everything to be like web mail and like Writely — or not with the cost of such a large bandwidth!

Now, that you know how Ulteo will actually be for you (thank you, Linux Format!), you might agree with François Bancilhon that maybe Gaël's ideas are not useful to Mandriva...

UPDATE: Giving what Gaël Duval just said (the 6th comment to this post), namely that "Ulteo Connected Desktop is only a part of the full Ulteo concept", we can reassess things this way:

• "Ulteo OS" might be a fully-fledged GNU/Linux distro, Kubuntu-based, supporting Xen and being able to accept remote desktop connections through some NX-like protocol;
• "Ulteo Connected Desktop" might be something you might be interested to use as a running session (most likely under Xen) hosted by a full Ulteo OS, probably subscription-based if it's not hosted by your servers.

This might be of some interest for some corporations, but even in a LAN or over a securized broadband connection, I'm not sure it will sell that much.

FOLLOW-UP! Gaël Duval Reacts In Full!

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