Running Raspberry Pis as Thin Clients with Ubuntu 14.04

http://www.uzerp.com/blog/running-raspberry-pis-as-thin-clients-with-ubuntu-14-04-lts/

by thisisnkp • 12 years ago

82 13 12 years ago

hollerith• 12 years ago

"Thin client" in this case means X Server.

In this case, the Raspberry Pi is an LDM client. More information is available on Wikipedia, and the LTSP wiki. Edubuntu also has good resources on LTSP, as it is integrated into the Distro!

vxxzy• 12 years ago

Cool. I'm currently working on a VDI solution using the rPI as a thin client for a chain Retailer in the DC area. We plan to use RFID Cards as authentication - a "roaming vdi". VMs are mint Linux and run on top of KVM.

morb• 12 years ago

Just out of curiosity, HN seems like a good place to ask: Does anyone actually here use unix-likes in a multiseat fashion, like they were used 30-40 years ago? Like described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration

gsz• 12 years ago

Yes, I have been using Fedora this way for a couple years now (ever since systemd made this easy in Fedora 17). Two heads, one running MythTV (most of the time), the other is my workstation.

jacquesm• 12 years ago

You will want this:

http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/Multiseat/

And if you're on arch linux this is a good start:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/xorg_multiseat

jewel• 12 years ago

Five years ago my wife and I shared an Ubuntu desktop. It was awesome, and we were even able to play 3D games together.

If I remember correctly, I had to bump the computer up to 6GB of RAM. She was running off the motherboard's built-in video card and I had two monitors on a separate card.

Eventually Ubuntu changed things so that it wouldn't work anymore, but I believe that it's possible to do now. If you have kids this would be a cheap way to give them all a decent amount of computing power.

Maakuth• 12 years ago

In Finland, a number of schools nowadays use Linux in this fashion. This solution has been especially great for modernizing entire computer classrooms at once, recycling old desktop PCs as LTSP clients. A server capable of serving a classroom full of clients is a lot cheaper than replacing the PCs. In my town, there's a company called Opinsys (http://www.opinsys.fi/en/) who does this and publishes most if not all of their code in Github (https://github.com/opinsys/). I wonder if they've been considering Raspberry Pis as clients.

giancarlostoro• 12 years ago

I wonder how this will work if I have Ubuntu on Hyper V.

harrylavender3• 12 years ago

It will work fine, as long as it is your authoritative DHCP server on your VLAN/LAN. I have it running on an ESXi server, alongside a load of other VMs. I have allocated it the following for ~15 users: 4GB RAM, 4 Cores across 2 sockets.

abcdefidk• 12 years ago

How's the screen refresh rate? I have an Arch distro on my Pi, used mostly for remoting purposes. RDesktop works really well, but the refresh rate is slow... 1-10 fps in most cases. I was hoping to bump it up to 50-60.

harrylavender3• 12 years ago

As long as you're using at least a 100Mb/s network (We use GbE), you should see a smooth experience. All works just as well as using a local machine, give or take some frames here and there. Just a forewarning, stay away from Google Chrome, and Chromium. They are awful to use with LTSP, you must deploy them as local apps as a fat-thin client solution, which isn't compatible with the Pi. The reasoning for this is that Chrome makes too many calls to the X server, and this causes horrible performance, you'll literally be watching chrome refresh, like loading an image over dialup.

otterpro• 12 years ago

I thought that Pi was the ideal for LTSP and remote X in local network. The achilles heel of Pi is that it's limited to 100mbps and not even all that due to its shared bus limitation. From experience, I could also tell the difference between 1Gbps and 100mbps NIC when connecting via X, so 100mbps wasn't good for multimedia. However, it still works great for most office-related work.

Running Raspberry Pis as Thin Clients with Ubuntu 14.04

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