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Icebergs.io Brings Linux Desktop to the Browser
- breakingcups 11y agoDoes anyone know what is used to offer the remote desktop functionality in HTML5?
- Tehnix 11y agoI don't know if this is what they use, but ThinLinc[0] from Cendio supports an HTML5 interface. [0] https://www.cendio.com/thinlinc/features/html5 https://www.cendio.com/thinlinc/features/html5
- hackthisuk 11y agoThey appear to be using noVNC https://kanaka.github.io/noVNC/ https://kanaka.github.io/noVNC/
- anentropic 11y agoI can't work out what this is for
- fit2rule 11y agoWould be good for developers who need to port something to Linux but don't want to go through the hassle of setting up a dedicated instance themselves .. build-servers that need a full Linux setup, etc. Might be good for folks who have very slow computers, or non-usable machines (iPads/tablets/phones/etc.) who nevertheless still need access to a Linux environment for school or work, or even just for the fun of learning Linux for the first time without much hassle. Its certainly easier to use/setup an instance than some of the other options out there, although things seem to be pretty competitive in this space .. so who knows how long icebergs.io is going to be around. I've bought a basic plan, anyway .. good for me to have my co-developers using this to build our project code without requiring a big fuss with setting up a PC/VM-instance/whatever... In short: it can be used to do whatever you might like to do with a Linux workstation. So: quite powerful, then ..
- balac 11y agoIf you are porting something to linux surely you will want to test it on a real VM at least? Those are pretty trivial to set up and are free...
- fit2rule 11y agoThis is a real VM. The likelihood that if it runs on here, it'll run on a 'real Ubuntu instance' is quite high.
- 0x4a42 11y agoBut why one would pay for a VM as a SAS when you can install one for free in a just a few minutes on your own machine?
- fit2rule 11y agoMaybe your machine isn't good enough for the VM? Lots of folks have low-budget, slow laptops that could still nevertheless benefit from having access to a decent Linux workstation environment.
- crististm 11y agoSo you suggest this is a good use-case because you can run Linux in a recent Firefox on an old machine better than you can run it natively?! Have you run a recent Firefox on an old machine for that matter?
- pvdebbe 11y agoI do recall encountering a similar X-server--HTML-bridge in the early 2000's. It also was a remote server with store for working files type of service, but free as I recall.
- baldfat 11y agoReally can't see a use case for myself and really looking for someone else's. I have my own personal server where I just ssh into for my needs and it is cheaper than $9.99 a month.
- isotope1 11y agoI think it's more targeted at interactive use, plus each instance is a lot more powerful than normal VPS (AWS t2.medium).
- j_s 11y agoThe pricing isn't quite ideal, but this may be useful in certain classroom situations - like a MeetUp or something like that.
- chrism2671 11y agoCan you suggest a better pricing structure? I'm trying to make it cheaper (it's just AWS is expensive that's all!)
- j_s 11y agoAll that I meant was that group pricing would be needed for a classroom setting. I'm not sure what I can contribute beyond that suggestion.
- metamet 11y agoI feel like you should have your own datacenter if you want to run a business like this. AWS is very expensive (but appropriate for many) and not intended for VDI.
- chrism2671 11y agoYes, I agree, I'm hoping that I can move the architecture to an LXC based setup to make it more efficient, and to allow instances to have unlimited hours (that's the destination).
- Simorgh 11y agoI assume a benefit is that, using icebergs.io, you could run/access linux on a lower spec machine? So for instance I've heard it would be difficult to install linux on a macbook 2015, but using icebergs through your browser you could do so. Correct me if I'm wrong.
- err4nt 11y agoYou wouldn't want to use this as a primary desktop, it would be like watching a YouTube video of your computer screen. Linux runs on very modest hardware, you shouldn't have any issue running it on a powerhouse like a 2015 Macbook if I have successfully run ElementaryOS and Ubuntu on my Mid-2011 Macbook Air! Even virtualizing Linux on top of OS X using software like VirtualBox would likely still be preferable to using browser-based VNC to a cloud desktop (and free). I have a KVM server I use for web development so I'm often in there via VNC using the desktop. It's not ideal but it works.
- jordigh 11y agoSounds a bit like http://rollapp.com http://rollapp.com
- fit2rule 11y agoJust tried it out .. very nice, quite usable, and fairly decent, performance-wise. Single CPU, 2.5ghz, decent enough for most Linux desktop tasks. The only issue I have is that it booted the instance and needed immediately to do a software update .. that's a bit of a drag, I'd be happier if the base instances were already up to date before they get configured/cloned .. but no big deal, really. ( * -) I'll use it for some ports and see how things go .. kudos to the icebergs.io team for making it pretty smooth to get a new Linux developer workstation set up easily enough .. EDIT: (- * ) Actually .. this is a big deal for anyone trying it out - the update occurs and then the machine reboots, and then of course .. you lose your instance on the free-tier account. So if you want to use this for free, don't bother doing an update and definitely don't reboot the instance thinking you'll get back an upgraded machine. Apparently thats only for paid users. EDIT2: Well, 5 minutes after finishing the software upgrade and accidentally hitting the "Restart" button without thinking, I'm left with a hung instance and seemingly no way to get the machine back to life. In case anyone from icebergs.io needs to know, the instance name is late-firefly-372, and all I did was log in, do the required software update, hit restart .. and wait .. and wait. The instance still seems to be responsive, but just not rebooting - some of the windows I left on the screen prior to the reboot appear to still be reacting to mouse events (the VNC config window checkboxes work), but the DE is dead and gone, and the machine doesn't seem to be letting me do anything .. thought I'd report it in case others run into this issue. Don't do the update and don't reboot! :)
- chrism2671 11y agoYep, founder here. Trying to work out how to reduce the cost of both the free plan & paid plans, in order to give more for less. For performance comparison, they are AWS t2.medium instances.
- agjmills 11y agoI obviously dont know your stack so this might be useless if you're heavily invested in AWS - but you might want to try scaleway, you'll definitely get more bang for your buck in terms of performance
- mwill 11y agoFor a moment I thought this was a HTML5 UI that spoke to a linux instance. I'm not sure what I'd use it for, but it'd be cool tech.
- michaelmior 11y agoIs that not what this is?
- arethuza 11y agoFor a moment I thought it was Linux running in a browser like this: http://bellard.org/jslinux/ http://bellard.org/jslinux/ As far as I can see it is what you think it is - a web based graphical remote desktop to a remote Linux instance.
- icebraining 11y agoI had the same thought - that someone had taken jslinux and made it run a full DE. I was somewhat disappointed.
- mwill 11y agoI believe this is using VNC? I was thinking something like a totally custom shell/thin client that ran in a browser and spoke to a linux instance over the network.
- ljlolel 11y agoTerminal.com has an XFCE snap that's cheaper and upgradeable too. You can pause them, which keeps the RAM state, so it's much cheaper and more useable: https://www.terminal.com/snapshot/56ae96b9c4d0b6c088a66e6a46d84f21376ac05952f1b05297371ffc56bd5ec4 https://www.terminal.com/snapshot/56ae96b9c4d0b6c088a66e6a46... http://yourname1-8080.terminal.com/guacamole/#/client/c/Desktop http://yourname1-8080.terminal.com/guacamole/#/client/c/Desk...
- jasonjei 11y agoGuacamole also has a Docker image that you can use to mount on a free AWS instance. Additionally, you can have a second docker container that runs GUI apps: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16296753/can-you-run-gui-apps-in-a-docker-container http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16296753/can-you-run-gui-...
- ljlolel 11y agoYea but this takes 30 seconds to setup.
- S4M 11y agoHow does this work? Is this some kind of Linux VM with an XFCE interface that runs in the browser?
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoThe VM's on their server, you're using it via some kind of HTML5 VNC/RDP client.
- comex 11y agoWith WebAssembly and related efforts (e.g. JS threading), I'm hoping it won't be long before we have services similar to this, but actually running in the browser rather than the cloud. A bit like that i386-in-browser demo, but with performance a decent fraction of native, OpenGL access, etc.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoYou can run Windows 95 in the browser: http://win95.ajf.me http://win95.ajf.me (But you probably already knew this, since you follow me on Twitter.)
- Tinyyy 11y agoWhat's the latency on this thing? Also, I've recently looked into remote desktop software, does anyone know of a good remote desktop software with very low latency through LAN? How low can it get? <50ms?
- pavs 11y agoWouldn't the latency depend on your location and the location of the server where its hosted? To answer your second question Teamviewer works good for us, we use it heavily in our office on linux desktops.
- chrism2671 11y agoThe latency depends on your connection, but on a commercial internet connection, you're looking at <50ms. Anything under 100ms is quite smooth.
- spreiti 11y agoI'm using X2Go[0] through LAN and it works very well. Just make sure you are using a compatible desktop environment[1] [0] http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/start http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/start [1] http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:de-compat http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:de-compat
- Tinyyy 11y agoHows the latency? Can you move the mouse naturally? That's my biggest concern. Also, on LAN can you run it at lossless / no compression? How's the latency on that?
- spreiti 11y agoOn my LAN I don't notice any latency at all. The mouse movement is natural. Regarding compression: I've set to the best quality and never had any problems or notable latency. You should give X2go a try. It's simple to setup up[0]. [0] http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:installation:x2goserver http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:installation:x2goserver
- pepon 11y agoI have been looking for a solution to do web development in the cloud, so that if lose my computer I can continue right away from another terminal, or I can also code from my iPad or check all my stuff from my smartphone or whatever. However your product is not suitable for my use case because I do not need a lot of computing power, for that I ssh to my AWS instances. What I would need from a remote OS is to be cheap and of course without time usage limits. The closest thing that I have seen to what I need is this Multiplex project: https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/3jvwj6/multiplex_cloud_os_in_your_browser/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/3jvwj6/multipl... . Just my 2 cents!
- travjones 11y agoI agree with your 2 cents, so I guess that makes 4 cents if we combine our cents. Most tasks I would do remote require minimal power. It would be great to have a cheap plan with unlimited usage but reduced access to resources (slower cpu, less RAM, etc.). I haven't tried it myself, but I think it would make more sense (at least for me) to get a 5-dolla droplet from Digital Ocean, install ubuntu + xfce + vnc and remote into that through an app (such as, VNC Viewer for iPad or similar).
- pepon 11y agoThe problem is that every remote desktop solution I have tried works quite slow and laggy. It does not feel as if you are sitting in front of your computer at all. Has anybody experienced the opposite? (I haven't tried this iceberg.io, so maybe theirs works ok) And it seems it does not really make sense to render all the graphics in the backend machine and got them sent over the Internet.
- travjones 11y agoI can't speak to the second part of your post, but I definitely agree with the first part. That is, in my experience, I have found remote desktops to be somewhat sluggish/poor quality gfx. I assume these are trade-offs for connecting to a machine via a network/internet.
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- rwmj 11y agoInteresting offering. I assume it runs on the server, with some kind of remote desktop (VNC or similar)? Back in 2000 I was involved in a start-up company doing that [1]. It failed because it was ahead of its time -- very few people had broadband, and the numbers didn't really add up, when you think about the cost of hosting the servers. (That's what we like to tell ourselves -- maybe it was also a terrible idea!) [1] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/officemaster/#content https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/officemaster/#content
- chrism2671 11y agoThat's right! Cool!
- fiatjaf 11y agoCrazy stuff.
- kelvin0 11y agoWhy does it seem wild to you?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoI want to run a similar free service for Windows NT 4, but finding an HTML5 client for RDP v4.0 might be hard.
- ThinkBeat 11y agoEvery minute you use it is one minute of compute time? So you actually get only 25/h of usage for 9.99 per month? Spread across two instances. I am quite interested in such a solution but the price point seems high. With at least 8*25 per month included it would be great.
- dangerlibrary 11y ago2015 is the Year of the Linux Desktop in the Browser. I ... really didn't see this coming.
- mavdi 11y agoThis is perfect for me guys. Nice work! I travel a lot and many times the SSH ports are disabled in the networks that I use, so having a GUI over HTTP like this is very helpful for me. Only downside is the cost, I think it could be a lot cheaper.
- dnet 11y agoYou can use SSLH and other similar software to multiplex HTTPS and SSH (along with a few other protocols) on the same port, so if 443/TCP is allowed, you can just use SSH.
- esonderegger 11y agoI see a bunch of comments asking about the use case, so I'll share one... The Defense Department agency I work for employs between 50 and 100 developers, many of whom, like me, are contractors. The security folks have things locked down to such a degree that developers don't have root access to their own machines and the process for getting new software approved for use on a developer machine takes months. We just got permission to have git installed, for example. Getting Nodejs installed probably isn't going to happen unless they could figure out a way to disable npm. All ports to the outside are shut down except for 80 and 443 and everything runs through IronPort, so anything running https has to allow you to not verify SSL. If the latency/general performance is good enough, I think developers would love to use something like this for their primary development environment. From the agency's perspective, $50-100 per developer per month would be cheap enough to be a no-brainer. As far as the security folks are concerned, this is just web traffic, so they would have no problem with it. My only issue is that this pricing doesn't seem to be very friendly to the use case of wanting just one instance, but with unlimited hours.
- ogezi 11y agoI don't think that this solution has any general appeal. Why would you use a computer in the cloud that will probably perform as well as a low end pc. Your case may be valid but for someone that wants serious security, is an cloud based OS that secure?
- ogezi 11y agoI don't think that this solution will have any general appeal. First it's probably only a niche of developers that will consider using this product. Secondly, why would someone use a computer in the cloud that will probably perform as well as a low end pc. Your case may be valid but for someone that wants serious security, is an cloud based OS really that secure?
- ddoolin 11y ago> Getting Nodejs installed probably isn't going to happen unless they could figure out a way to disable npm. Entirely possible! Just ask the folks at the last company I worked for (a bank). What a nightmare.
- inflam52 11y agoI agree. It's hard to wrap my head around the pricing. I can use my DigitalOcean and just install a VNC. I see where you are going with this though. I long for a future where you can achieve desktop-like performance in the cloud.
- chrism2671 11y agoI agree. I'm trying to reduce the pricing, but it's stuck to AWS pricing on the backend. Working on it though.
- chrism2671 11y agoI'll add, these are t2.medium instances; which are mid-range (about 4x the size of the cheapest digital ocean instances).
- philtar 11y agoVNC is terrible. I can't imagine you've used anything like this in a long time because things are moving in this space.
- idiot900 11y agoCan you share your experiences of better alternatives? Not hard to imagine VNC has been substantially improved on.
- ymse 11y agoSpice works pretty well: http://www.spice-space.org/ http://www.spice-space.org/
- anonbanker 11y agoin HTML5: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/spice/spice-html5/ http://cgit.freedesktop.org/spice/spice-html5/
- swznd 11y agoIt's for webkit based browsers only. The cursor cannot move when I use Firefox.
- jupiter2 11y agoI use to do something similar from late-'95 to early '98 using DOS, ANSI BBS dialer, 56k modem (EDIT: 386DX, 4mb RAM). Would dial in directly into a Linux terminal (it might've been Unix) - pure, whopping fast, text-base experience. The server did the heavy lifting, including access over a T1 - I only received the formatted text results. Lynx was my main browser (effective at the time, simple html). Pine for email. Don't recall what I used for Usenet, editors, file managers and some other stuff. Copy/paste and some automation using DOS tools & TSRs. I did this out of necessity at the time but later moved over to Win98. Finally embraced Linux this year as my full-time OS so this site has a stronger appeal.
- spyder 11y agoWorks great, I can start and use WebStorm faster on the server than locally on my old Core 2 Duo laptop (with SSD).