Earlier this week, the Fedora Linux community announced the availability of Fedora 14 beta 1. As expected the distribution now includes the remote desktop protocol Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) 0.6, released in mid September.
SPICE adds a QXL display device to QEMU and provides drivers for this device for both Linux and Windows (XP, Vista and 7) clients.
The features currently supported in this version are:
- Accelerated 2D graphics
- “Hardware” cursor support
- Audio playing / recording
- Image compression, both lossless and lossy (for WAN support)
- Video detection with MPEG streaming
- Encryption
- Client side mouse pointer support
This should be considered a technology preview only, as SPICE 1.0 apparently won’t be available before H2 2011.