Neuros HD: I dig that crazy beat

The $399 Neuros HD 20GB is that rare product that actually exceeds expectations.

As a music player, it’s hard to beat. The Neuros HD 20GB comes with a 20GB hard drive; my 1,300-odd (in some cases, very odd) MP3 songs barely fill a quarter of the space. (The company also sells a 128MB solid state MP3 player.) Playback quality through the bundled earbuds is excellent. Neuros also includes an FM tuner that uses the earpiece cord as an antenna.

Other accessories include a wall charger for the built-in lithium-ion battery and a car adapter that lets you take the Neuros on a road trip without having to worry about losing power.

The Neuros lacks a cassette adapter for playing its audio through a car cassette player. Instead it offers MiFi, which broadcasts the music over a short distance to an unused frequency on the FM radio spectrum — much more convenient. Unfortunately I couldn’t get MiFi to work, so I was stuck with listening through the earbuds, unable to share my music with my family (for which they blessed the vendor) until I realized that you use either the earpieces or MiFi, but not both at the same time.

I had other troubles getting things to work. The Neuros HD comes bundled with synchronization software for Windows PCs, but it requires the Microsoft .Net Framework be installed. If .Net isn’t there already, Neuros will install it — except on my computer. Every time I tried, either from the installation mini-CD or via a download from Microsoft’s site, the installation process hung. I finally got it to complete successfully by disabling several IIS component services — something I probably should have done long ago for the sake of my system’s security.

Luckily, Neuros also works with Linux synchronization software, though it’s not as slick as the Windows version. Positron runs in a console window and lets you perform all the major functions of adding, deleting, and synchronizing songs. It’s extremely well documented, and offers support for Ogg Vorbis files, once you’ve downloaded and installed pyogg and pyvorbis.

The Neuros Sync Manager application for Windows, despite its graphical interface, leaves something to be desired. It lets you play tracks, but any changes you make to ID3 tags within the interface aren’t saved back to the files themselves. And while the program is designed to automatically check for software and firmware updates, the latter feature always seemed to think I wasn’t connected to the Internet.

Neuros offers a cool feature called HiSi, short for “Hear it! Save it!” I could do without the cutesy name, which is easily confused with MiFi, but the feature is nice. When you hear a given song on an FM station but don’t know who sings it, you press a button on the unit, which then records a 30-second sample of the song. When you get back to your computer and synchronize, you can right-click on the sample and have the software identify it across the Internet. Unfortunately HiSi only works with the Windows verion of Neuros Sync Manager.

Battery life was acceptable, not exceptional, as you might expect of a device that has to actually move the platter and heads of a hard disk drive. The vendor claims 10 hours of continuous playback, but I’d feel lucky if I got half that. FM reception was pretty good when the earbud wire was fully extended. The front of the player sports five preset buttons for your favorite stations on the left, and a lock button on the right that disables all the other buttons, which makes it practical to carry the player in your pocket without having it switch songs midstream.

Neuros HD came out in March, and is well poised to compete with other hard drive-based MP3 players like the Archos Jukebox, RCA Lyra, and Apple iPod. It’s more expensive, but it offers more too. And for Linux users, it’s definitely the best game in town.

NoMachine offers universal thin client appeal

Linux naturally lends itself to thin client computing — it’s easy to boot remote workstations off a Linux server with software as basic as an X Window server or as useful as the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP). Rome-based NoMachine is now offering thin client computing with a new twist. NoMachine’s NX Server and NX Client let you use the same software on both Windows and Linux machines. Organizations deploying Linux client/server applications, as well as those considering moving their desktops to Linux, will find NoMachine’s NX software an elegant, cost-effective alternative that’s easy to implement.

Thin client computing lets users run applications on a remote server and display the results locally. NX Client works something like VNC (see our recent story), but instead of using Remote Frame Buffer protocol, NX Client acts as an X Window server. Thin clients help contain costs by eliminating the need to install applications at each user’s desktop, and improve security by limiting the availability of applications and data. The clients themselves can be dedicated hardware devices or regular computers running thin client software.

NoMachine excels in the breadth of platforms it supports. NoMachine has server editions for personal, small business, and enterprise use on Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, and United Linux. The range of client platforms is even wider, including all those Linux systems plus Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP, iPaq and Zaurus 5xxx handhelds, and even PlayStation 2. And the price is right — NX Client is free. The server costs €54.50, €124.50, or €494.50, depending on the edition, per server, with no per-client-connection costs. For a product of this scope, that’s nearly free. Of course, the company has to keep costs down because alternative products, like LTSP, are free, but the NX products offer advantages worth paying for.

One of those advantages is security. To run NX Server on a Linux server, you must be running an SSH daemon, as NX uses SSH remote execution facilities. All network communication takes place over SSL-encrypted links. Another key advantage is performance. The client and server components compress X traffic for transmission over the network to provide a responsive connection to users connecting across the Internet. According to the company:

NoMachine has developed exclusive X protocol compression techniques and an integrated set of proxy agents that make it possible to run complete remote desktop sessions, even at full screen, using narrowband Internet connections, at speeds as low as those offered by a 9600 baud modem.

I tested NX Server on a Mandrake 9.1 box. You must install NX Client software on the server too before installing NX Server to avoid failed dependency errors. My installation went flawlessly. When it finished, the installation routine printed two informational messages instructing how to add a user and enable printer and file sharing. Both are console commands — there’s no GUI management application. The final step in server installation is to move an activation key to an NX directory. After doing everything right and still failing to connect, NoMachine’s tech support staff walked me through additional steps I needed to take in order for NX Server to accept SSH connections.

NX Client installed equally easily on both the Mandrake machine and a Windows XP computer. A wizard guides you through setting the connection parameters, including choosing KDE, Gnome, or custom window settings, then puts an icon on the desktop to invoke a connection with the right parameters.

Once the server authenticates your client, you’re presented with a Window that looks just like a native session on your chosen server. Anything you can do locally you can now do remotely. Response time, even connecting to NoMachine’s test server across the Internet (more than 20 hops away), showed very little lag. I didn’t try stressing the server with dozens or hundreds of clients, but NoMachine lets you aggregate servers into a single logical node if server performance becomes a bottleneck.

Many thin clients run against a Windows server, using software like Microsoft Terminal Services 2003, Citrix MetaFrame and Tarantella Enterprise 3. NX Client can work with those platforms too — the company says, “NX encapsulates and translates into X protocol the Remote Desktop Protocol used by Microsoft Windows NT/2000 Terminal Server Edition and Citrix Metaframe, and Remote Frame Buffer, the protocol used by VNC” — and NX Server provides a professional alternative for those who prefer a Linux server platform.

I was extremely impressed with NX Server and NX Client, which hit the market only five months ago. If NoMachine manages to get the word out, NX Server should become a popular tool indeed.

AirTraf: A handy Wi-Fi site survey tool

Last month I used NetStumbler under Windows to search for wireless access points in my travels. This month I gave a Linux-based alternative a spin. AirTraf is a basic site survey tool that looks for 802.11b access points and displays traffic statistics.

I downloaded AirTraf from Elixar.com and decompressed the .tar.gz file. When I ran the make command in the AirTraf directory, I got a long list of parse errors from the ethtool.h file. By editing /usr/local/include/wireless.h and commenting out the include directive for ethtool.h I was able to run make and make install successfully.

I invoked AirTraf from the command line on an IBM ThinkPad T22 running Mandrake Linux 9.1, with a Xircom CWE1100 CreditCard Wireless Ethernet adapter. In order to run, AirTraf needs a screen of at least 120 characters wide and 45 characters long, so I had to adjust the Settings of the Konsole window and specify a custom size.

When you start the program, AirTraf enters monitor mode, in which AirTraf controls the card entirely, meaning you can’t surf the Web or chat on IRC in another window. It first scans the 14 available Wi-Fi channels looking for access points. When it finds any, you can choose one for detailed analysis.

AirTraf’s real-time reporting shows MAC, network, and transport-layer statistics, broken down into incoming, outgoing, and total packets and bytes passing through the selected access point. It can also analyze TCP performance for other wireless nodes it detects. You can capture traffic to a disk file and replay it, viewing the results in the performance monitor screens.

AirTraf is a 1.0 product, so it lacks all the features it might someday grow into. (For comparison, see AiroPeek NX, a commercial wireless protocol analyzer first released about a year before AirTraf that runs under Windows.) Welcome enhancements would include application-layer protocol decoding and WEP key decoding.

Still, AirTraf has broader network adapter support than NetStumbler, and it’s a free download running under the GNU license. It’s a handy tool to take on the road when you’re going wireless.