Hi everyone, my question is regarding using Pd over a network.
As far as I understand Pd runs as a server plus graphical client which sends control information to the localhost at the Pd port. I am wondering if it is possible to have the Pd server running on one machine without the "canvas" and have the Pd interface running on another machine which would pass all its information to the networked server? Basically I would like to have a headless box doing all the audio processing and midi communication, and run a netbook with a Pd window controlling the box over wifi or ethernet.

Thanks a lot!

P.S.
I am totally new to Pd and I think it is a phenomenal piece of software.

Yes you can do that.

Look at [netsend] and [netreceive] and the startup options in the html documentation.

If the server is a linux machine you could use X11. Or you could use VNC. Not sure [netsend] and [netreceive] would do what sollol is looking for.

yes, I think editing/creating patches on a remote machine is not possible from within pd itself.

you would have to follow saturno's advice.

But if you knew what sort of application you wanted to build and all the parameters and arguments you wanted to send to it, you could easily develop a patch on the remote machine that waits for your incoming messages sent via [netsend] or [sendOSC]

The thing is, I'm trying to avoid X. I want to get the lowest latency with least money for hardware. I want to run a dedicated, headless, X-less, Pd host, and have the controller elsewhere. I know I can use netsend to get messages to and from built patches, but I want to build patches remotely. VNC and ssh defeat the purpose. I want one box handling audio exclusively and another box handling the interface.

isn't X required to communicate the high level mouse gestures (connect line between this object over here and that object over there) to the low level audio engine anyway, (I know you want to separate exactly that but to my knowledge it is still X talking in low level mode) and thus unavoidable, for your desire?

p.s. X was built for the ability to streamline processing power by being able to compute any OS and app GUI needs on a separate machine

One of the startup options for Pd is to connect to a pre-existing GUI. Is there a way to start the GUI on one machine and connect to it from another?

I often run head-less. On your pd machine, startup without invoking X, just boot to a shell or kill x using the init.d script or whatever. Then, shh into your box using x forwarding:

$ ssh -X username@myPdBox.local

A good deal of the work will be done by your client machine this way, I usually do this in consort with an sftp client to copy files and edit configs.

That sounds very promising, i'm going to try just connecting two boxes with an ethernet cable directly, I crimped a crossover cable today, I'll do some testing and post my results. Thanks for the idea nestor.

Today I finally got around to doing the direct connection and controlling a machine remotely with my netbook. The main box I was using is an old Compaq nx9600, lots of things don't work in it, but the specs are still significant. I was using an acer ao110 netbook for controll, both machines running sidux. The boxes were connected directly using a crossover and both had their wireless up and running, the main box was streaming audio from a windows share in my house. I used a dj program called Mixxx for testing because I am pretty familiar with its performance on the netbook itself. My main soundcard is an Emu 0404.
While idle the average network latency between the boxes was 0.140 ms, with audio running it was 3.185 ms. I had an axiom 25 midi controller also plugged into the compaq and controlling the crossfader and such.
I got the playback latency down to 10 ms with ALSA doing the math. I got the ocassional clicks while loading songs with the other channel playing and such, but overall I was very impressed.
I haven't tried any Pd testing yet, I don't really know what to do to benchmark the performance difference, but I'll get to it and if I find something interesting I'll post here again.

Thanks everyone, this was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. And I have better performance than I ever had on Windows! I am very happy. Special thanks goes to nestor.