Thursday March 30, 2006

Many of you have probably heard of Tarantella. Sun acquired them a while back and renamed the product line to the Sun Secure Global Desktop (SGD). In the off-hours, I'm working with a buddy of mine to set up some infrastructure, heavily leveraging SGD. I'll give more context in a later blog entry.

Regarding SGD, I've got a desktop up and running on a host I have out on the 'Net. Right now I am running the desktop through my browser via Java applet from a Sun office. No client software install (yeah!). Performance isn't too bad, but redraws are noticeable (note, 16-bit color configured). A few notes on that. First, the setup is out of the box with no RTFM and no tuning. Next, I'm going through a Sun proxy from inside the Sun network. Last, the network from this particular Sun office leaves a lot to be desired. If anyone has any off-the-cuff advice on tuning for low bandwidth and/or high latency (especially latency), feel free to comment. We suspect that, given his deployment scenario, performance won't be a problem at all. My buddy is having very good results from a performance perspective from his home, for example. In fact, he's pretty darn stoked.

Note, anyone can download SGD for free.