FreeNX - low-bandwidth replacement for VNC

[Ben]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if what anyone knows or thinks about a Mac port of  
the "FreeNX" NX server?

Briefly, what NX essentially is, is a replacement/alternative for  
VNC. But it's much, *much* faster and more responsive, because it  
uses much lower bandwidth than VNC. VNC is fine to use over LAN or  
really fast ADSL, but it's almost unusable over anything slower than  
really fast ADSL.
Even on a LAN, VNC, while pretty darn good, you can still very much  
tell that it's a network display. Apparently, with NX, you almost can  
barely tell at all.

You can even run NX server (eg "server B") on another server on a  
LAN, and tunnel VNC (eg from "server A") over it - it somehow decodes  
the VNC data sent from server A, reencodes it into NX protocol on  
server B, and then from a remote machine on a slow link you can  
connect to server B using NX, and view server A's screen - with the  
speed benefit of NX instead of VNC.

NX was developed as a commercial product, and is sold by the  
(Italian) developer (NoMachine) as a commercial product. They release  
the client for free, but you must pay for the server.
They did not create/release a server for OS X though (only a client).  
So paying or not, you cannot run NX server on OS X.

However, they opensourced the NX protocol that they created and made  
it free for use, and the open source community created an alternate  
free opensource server, called FreeNX.
It has been ported to most or all the Linux distibutions, and FreeBSD  
(and possibly more).
However it's never been ported to OS X, as far as I can find.

I've downloaded the source (freenx-0.6.0.tar.gz) and while I can  
usually build and install "normal" packages like postgres/apache/php  
etc, freeNX is a more complicated build and I don't know how to do it  
(I'm far from being an expert with building/compiling).

I wondering (and hoping) if anyone might be interested in figuring  
out how to build it on OS X and create a MacPort...

Any thoughts/comments/etc welcomed!


Relevant links:

NoMachine (the developer)
http://www.nomachine.com/

Free download OS X client for NX
http://www.nomachine.com/download-client-macosx.php

FreeNX server
http://freenx.berlios.de/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/freenx/

Download link for FreeNX source tarball
http://prdownload.berlios.de/freenx/freenx-0.6.0.tar.gz


Regards,
Ben