Light at the End of the Tunnel

Admins have more interesting add-ons, such as x2gospyglass, which is useful for teachers; it displays thumbnails of student desktops, organized by classroom, Posix group, or individually.

X2Go is one of the most substantial remote access open source software projects available. It impresses with its selection of clients, extremely flexible administration, comprehensive selection of tools, and state-of-the-art authentication methods.

X2Go has also convinced other projects and many schools; the report in the "Linux4Afrika and X2Go" box explains why the development aid project switched from Edubuntu to X2Go. Also, X2Go is interesting for anyone wanting to give multiple users access to a single system, if bandwidth is insufficient for VNC, or if you need file shares and audio forwarding on top.

R-zwo-R in Rohrdorf, Germany [16], offers service-level agreements for anyone interested in running X2Go in an enterprise environment: A major part of the revenue generated from support goes directly to X2Go. The developers deliberately avoided a dual license.

For comparison's sake, Sun charges EUR$ 90 per user and more than EUR$ 200 for each hardware-based Sun Ray client.

An ISO image of the Live CD is now available [17].