[HN Gopher] Raspberry Pi as x2go "thin" client
___________________________________________________________________
Raspberry Pi as x2go "thin" client
Author : indigodaddy
Score : 99 points
Date : 2021-01-23 10:03 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.multi-seat.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.multi-seat.com)
| denysvitali wrote:
| > Resource Limit Is Reached
|
| > The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it
| exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.
|
| F
| philtar wrote:
| F
| geek_at wrote:
| Would this also work with remote Windows RDP sessions?
| indigodaddy wrote:
| No, but there are Linux RDP clients (such as Remmina) you can
| use which I would imagine would also work well from a Pi.
| nullify88 wrote:
| No but I think installing something like
| https://guacamole.apache.org/ could work well.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| yes. 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
| Renaud wrote:
| For 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-
| rp... [2]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsob_pQXnCM
| veddox wrote:
| We 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.
| jkh1 wrote:
| I'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.
| acomjean wrote:
| I 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
| cpach wrote:
| We had Sun rays at uni. I kinda liked them.
| whalesalad wrote:
| How'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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I work with RDP almost every day for several years now, hardly
| been a problem.
|
| In fact just yesterday while I could easily connect with RDP,
| Slack was just dying when trying to share screens.
| amryl wrote:
| You could try solutions oriented toward gaming like Parsec or
| Nvidia Gamestream with Moonlight. They use hardware
| acceleration for video encoding and may have better latency
| than RDP.
|
| https://parsec.app/
|
| https://moonlight-stream.org/
| cbhl wrote:
| If you're trying to drive 4K, I would look at the power of the
| thin client, and maybe try putting a graphics card there,
| rather than in the server.
|
| I'd also check your choice of RDP client -- are you using the
| official Microsoft client or a FOSS one? I believe there are
| extensions to RDP that basically wrap H.264, which you'd
| probably want at that resolution.
| tyingq wrote:
| What switch/router is it going through? There's a lot of
| gigabit hardware that can't push gigabit speeds.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Ah, okay. And I guess you've already played with various
| group policy around compression, gpu acceleration
| (RemoteFX) , etc, for RDP.
| whalesalad wrote:
| RemoteFX is something I had not heard of - will take a
| look!
| zamadatix wrote:
| RemoteFX will enable both GPU acceleration in apps as
| well as GPU acceleration in the RDP session encode but...
|
| RDP is still only limited to 30 FPS for whatever reason
| and so you may continue to be disappointed in it.
|
| Also 1,300 Mbps sounds like a wireless network so your
| main problem on the network side is being half duplex and
| airtime delays (even from just beacons) not throughput.
| I'd pick a 100 Mbps hardwire to RDP on over any Wi-Fi
| setup as the video bandwidth isn't actually that helpful
| but jitter/latency are problems with trying to send
| inputs at the same time. Not much you can do about that
| though.
| gruez wrote:
| Doesn't remote fx require special hardware/os on the host
| side?
| deburo wrote:
| Do 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.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Yes! I am having the same issue, but I have a mixture of
| old school 10k SAS disks and a bunch of desktop grade
| SATA SSDs.
|
| Windows performance on this machine is atrocious
| (virtualized in ESXI) whereas Linux is great.
| stedaniels wrote:
| I connect from Windows 10 client to a Windows 10 host using RDP
| driving dual 4K and it feels like native, though I mostly just
| use single 4K. This it's my daily driver over a standard UK
| fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) connection client end to a gigabit
| connection host side.
|
| I'm generally using office, internet, Windows terminals/ssh,
| IDEs etc. Very rarely an overly dramatic full page video advert
| will jolt me back to reality that I'm doing this over RDP.
| beagle3 wrote:
| I saw you wrote that you don't think the network is your
| problem, but it could be. The 1300mbps and UniFI makes me think
| you are using a wireless connection, and those often deliver
| much lower bandwidth than they should, and always have more
| latency than I expect.
|
| Use a wired 1Gbps connection. If it works acceptably -- which
| it has in every single setting I've tried -- then it _is_ your
| network, though it might not be where you usually look (e.g.
| speedtest measures your overall bandwidth, but if you have many
| retransmits, you might have horrible interactive experience
| even with sufficient bandwidth).
| whalesalad wrote:
| I should note the same thing happens while hardwired. I
| definitely wanted to rule it out.
| watersb wrote:
| Is your Ubiquiti box doing Deep Packet Inspection over your
| home network?
|
| It might be frantically trying to look at every packet
| flying by.
| buserror wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Do 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 wrote:
| I'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.
| buserror wrote:
| I have not done a comparison, but RDP is mostly pixel based
| from what I understand, while x2go is "protocol" based (and
| therefore limited to xorg/x11), so it's a LOT quicker than
| say, VNC (even with compression) -- for example, if you drag
| a window around, it's perfectly "instant" -- there is no lag.
|
| I can develop using geany/vscode/eclipse remotely over a
| reasonably good DSL/fibre connection and quite frankly, there
| is zero difference with being "local" to the workstation.
| Don't even need a LAN.
|
| Only thing which obviously doesn't work as good is web
| browsing/video etc as that is inherently a lot more pixel
| pushing.
| peckrob wrote:
| I 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.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Is 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!
| zaggynl wrote:
| Site died, mirror:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210123100731/http:/www.multi-s...
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Thanks. Perhaps a mod should replace the URL with the archived
| one.
| hedora wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| was 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
| tyingq wrote:
| The 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/
| watersb wrote:
| X96 even has an LED clock display, so you can make it blink
| 12:00 all the time, just like the real machines.
| SixThreeOne wrote:
| I'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.
| Kaknut wrote:
| Haha.... HN traffic killed the server but anyways the new
| offering from Raspberry in indeed a great microcontroller from
| projects.
|
| Ordered it.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I would love to read a blog post about your setup and your
| routine using this arrangement.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| meh. 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.
| nikolay wrote:
| I 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.
| znpy wrote:
| I wonder how things like X2Go and LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
| Project) will be re-implemented when Wayland will take over.
| znpy wrote:
| Lol i'm getting downvoted (by Wayland fanboys I guess) but no
| answer so far
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-01-23 23:01 UTC)