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Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client
- zaggynl 6y agoSite died, mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20210123100731/http:/www.multi-seat.com/x2go/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210123100731/http:/www.multi-s...
- indigodaddy 6y agoThanks. Perhaps a mod should replace the URL with the archived one.
- denysvitali 6y ago> Resource Limit Is Reached > The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later. F
- philtar 6y agoF
- geek_at 6y agoWould this also work with remote Windows RDP sessions?
- indigodaddy 6y agoNo, but there are Linux RDP clients (such as Remmina) you can use which I would imagine would also work well from a Pi.
- nullify88 6y agoNo but I think installing something like https://guacamole.apache.org/ https://guacamole.apache.org/ could work well.
- Renaud 6y agoFor those looking to make Rpi into RDP clients, there is TLXOS-RPi[1]. The license is cheap and it works in multi-monitor mode as well[2]. [1]:https://tls.thinlinx.com/store/index.php/thinclient/tlxos-rpi-firmware-license.html https://tls.thinlinx.com/store/index.php/thinclient/tlxos-rp... [2]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsob_pQXnCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsob_pQXnCM
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoyes. any darn thing that can run a rdp client can work. i have been using a 512mb thin client on a big fat windows 10 machine for more than 4 years now you can most definitely use any Rpi
- acomjean 6y agoI worked at a place that swapped out our HP pa-risc workstations for sun ray thin client machines. I actually didn’t mind as the network was pretty fast. The raspberry pi is a competent little computer and probably way more capable than those “sun” ray thin clients https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray
- cpach 6y agoWe had Sun rays at uni. I kinda liked them.
- guenthert 6y agoThe SunRays were sweet. The CPU of the RPi is capable of running circles around the one found in the 'Rays, but in my experience, performance was limited by the server. The Sun Rays had also decent sound ("CD quality"), a Cisco compatible VPN client and a smart card which allowed one to comfortably drag one's session from one Ray to another (home to office, cubicle to lab, etc.).
- buserror 6y agoI use x2go all the time, I have one single big workstation, and the laptops and the "thin" machine in my lab are tethered to it all the time, even when outside, via wireguard. I'm not surprised a raspi can do that, as I've used an antique thinkpad x201 for doing it for many many years now!
- raphinou 6y agoI'm using freerdp client to connect to an xrdp server. I'm positively surprised of the good user experience it provides on a LAN. Anyone having hands-on experience comparing x2go and xrdp?
- posix_me_less 6y agoDo you know if there is a functioning xrdp server+client combination for Linux? I would like to try to compare to x2go. I tried some on opensuse last year but it didn't work.
- raphinou 6y agoI'm successfully using the packages in ubuntu focal (20.04, the latest LTS). It was nearly straight-forward: install and run xrdp on the server, install package freerdp2-x11 on the client. The only unintuitive thing was the keyboard mapping to use, specified with an awkward value passed to the /kbd flag.
- wkearney99 6y agowell, there's also the audio issues. pulseaudio config for remote use isn't always reliable. but otherwise, yeah xrdp works great for access from machine that already have the client installed.
- peckrob 6y agoI used to use cheap Wyse Winterms in a configuration like this years ago. They could be had for about $20 a pop used on eBay 15 years go. A quick look now confirms they can still be had for about $15-20 each. Pair with xrdp on a server and it works great.
- Kaknut 6y agoHaha.... HN traffic killed the server but anyways the new offering from Raspberry in indeed a great microcontroller from projects. Ordered it.
- intricatedetail 6y agoIs it really worth posting? I mean it's like "PC as a photo editing machine" and then describe how you install the Photoshop. Come on HN you can do better!
- veddox 6y agoWe use such a setup for the students‘ computer lab at our research institute. Great way to get a lot of cheap work stations and introduce students to Linux and server computing. Although one should also mention that the Pis are a little too slow for „serious“ work, and x2go can be buggy.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agomeh. if you are on windows you should check rdpwrap. i personally dont give a rats ass about "licensing". using kms38 on ltsc. then use krdc or remmina or whatever and that works beautifully. it just has to be updated whenever windows gets a new update, lets say every 6 months or so, im not sure other than that, i have never used linux as a "server" but i guess the performance would be equally good.
- whalesalad 6y agoHow’s the experience of working on it? I’ve been struggling to get a decent remote setup even in my home lab due to network latency. Could be because I’m trying to drive 4K. Even Win10 RDP over a 1300mbps network struggles. I wonder if I need to bite the bullet and install a real graphics card in the R720. Would love to hear more experiences of others who remote this way where you are “offloading” your compute power elsewhere.
- tyingq 6y agoWhat switch/router is it going through? There's a lot of gigabit hardware that can't push gigabit speeds.
- whalesalad 6y agoI have a totally over-engineered UniFi setup at home. I’m pretty confident the network is not the issue. I experience the performance issues on the LAN, for instance, even with a 1,300mbps negotiated connection.
- tyingq 6y agoAh, okay. And I guess you've already played with various group policy around compression, gpu acceleration (RemoteFX) , etc, for RDP.
- whalesalad 6y agoRemoteFX is something I had not heard of - will take a look!
- deburo 6y agoDo you even struggle with RDP when you're on the same network? We also have an R720 at work, running a Windows Server 2016 under Hyper-V and it performs very poorly (Windows UI is super slow, etc.). I know next to nothing about physical servers, but I've had great success swapping HDDs for SSDs in laptops to dramatically increase Windows' modern UI's performance. Our R720 has HDDs instead of SSDs, I've thought of upgrading them to see how it works out. If you ever find a solution, please let me know.
- znpy 6y agoI wonder how things like X2Go and LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) will be re-implemented when Wayland will take over.
- znpy 6y agoLol i'm getting downvoted (by Wayland fanboys I guess) but no answer so far
- tyingq 6y agoThe X96 max referenced on the same site looks pretty neat. It's a little Android TV box that appears to be ~$30 or so if you order from China, or ~$65 from Amazon. http://www.multi-seat.com/x96-max/ http://www.multi-seat.com/x96-max/
- watersb 6y agoX96 even has an LED clock display, so you can make it blink 12:00 all the time, just like the real machines.
- hedora 6y agoA few years ago, on my raspberry pi 3, tigervnc was almost fast enough to drive fullscreen video. I had to recompile the jpeg library to switch to turbojpeg and rebuild tigervnc against that. Hopefully this “just works” now on a raspberry pi 4 and newer raspbian, but I haven’t checked.
- cat199 6y agowas doing this with a pi2 and some tweaked default settings pretty successfully - don't recall what - but I think turning off jpeg compression helped because the CPU didn't have to process the stream as much
- SixThreeOne 6y agoI've been doing something similar, but I've had good luck using nomachine. My host machine is a Kubuntu VM running on my Proxmox server, and I switch between using a desktop and laptop as guests, also connecting in remotely via wireguard when away from home (which honestly isn't very much these days). I tried using xrdp before, but, at least at the time I tried it a few years back, personally felt I got better performance with nomachine vs. xrdp, although perhaps this has changed now. I've tried x2go with individual applications before, but never the entire desktop, perhaps I'll have to give that a try sometime.
- nikolay 6y agoI used to use x2go for years, but the slow and buggy clients on macOS and Windows is the biggest drawback. Maybe one day it will get native clients and quickly become the standard.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoThe capabilities of using a tiny client for a beefy/flexible server seem to be getting better and more mature as robust clients get cheap and bandwidth get solid. I love it. I’ve been very very slowly using AWS as my “computer” more and more. S3 is a wonderfully cheap infinite hard drive and I never have to worry about migrating scripts. And EC2 is as flexible as computing gets. And since I need to recreate everything every time I boot up, reproducibility is a must, but that’s easy when you have it from the get go. I kinda worry about the economical likely next steps of using a thin client like a raspberry pi, like everything will become netflix/stadia and you never own the important bits. But on the technical side it’s really great.
- plg 6y agoI would love to read a blog post about your setup and your routine using this arrangement.
- nemosaltat 6y ago+1
- jkh1 6y agoI've been working from home for almost a year using a Pi4B running remmina. The other end is a Dell workstation running x11vnc on Ubuntu 16.04. I've only experienced occasional hiccups that I've narrowed down to things interfering with the Pi wifi reception when it's in a heatsink case.