TrueOS Pico – FreeBSD ARM/RPi Thin Clients | Hacker News Reader

TrueOS Pico – FreeBSD ARM/RPi Thin Clients

trueos.org

90 pointsmboroi23 comments

Our company has been running LSTP on commodity hardware since 2013 for a development team, and I am truly happy with the result.

For a long time, a 2013 i7 CPU with 32 GiB RAM running LTSP over ESXi was more than enough for intensive use of 5 thin clients.

We've recently switched to a more powerful server (refurbished 48 AMD cores / 256 GB RAM) running Proxmox and despite some issues that still needs minor tweaking, I am very happy with it.

The only gray area, and the reason I am always looking for alternatives to LTSP (NX2Go is the strongest candidate), is the huge bandwidth used by LTSP: 8 Thin clients needs a sustained 600 Mbps. I'm afraid scaling over 10 / 15 workstations will require expensive network equipment but graphic user experience is near native in all aspects.

I highly recommend to anyone that is in doubt of using LTSP or any other thin client setup in production, give it a try because it actually worth it in all aspects.

> scaling over 10/15 will require expensive network equipment

Hopefully, that won't be the case soon! [0] I've no idea how far away the tech is for production use, but I'm quite excited by it myself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-T_and_5GBASE-T

2.5gbps exists today. 10g switches are under $100/port now.

Can you point to any 10g switch on that price range? Last time I searched for there all were over $700 - $1000 USD.

Alternative was to use a 4 ports NIC with bonding but 10Gb will be far more easy and stable.

Here's a good Reddit thread that I used in the past when I set up a 10gb switch a few years back, and it only cost me around $200: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/2s5x3s/10gb_switch...

I remember using XDMCP ~20 years ago for this (underpowered machine as thin-client to beefy server, with graphical login). Does LTSP have additional features or better performance?

LTSP 4 uses XDMCP as Login manager and GUI export.

LTSP Clients boot with PXE and get the root filesystem via NFS, then it uses XDMCP login screen.

AFAIK, LTSP 5 uses LDM instead of XDCMP.

I think http://www.virtualgl.org/About/Introduction (used in this product) is actually more interesting - has anyone used it?

VirtualGL is/was used in Bumblebee, the support software for Optimus cards on Linux: https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/wiki/FAQ#how-...

I was interested in the thin client concept few years ago and tried virtualgl. It is really nice and impressive. There are few different configurations available. I aimed for low latency and 30 fps gaming was easy to achieve over 1gb link (it needs wide bandwith as expected).

I would be nice if there was a video demonstrating the thin client capabilities of this. I for one would like to see the OpenGL in action (yes, show me games!).

Plus, which Pi is this made for? I am assuming the Raspberry Pi 2 & 3 (ARMv7). I have all 3 model B's so I'll check this out.

Google cached page : http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

What protocol is being used between the clients and the server?

rPI's aren't too far off sunrays which worked very well, but I think ALP is prop?

I've not had a play with Spice, shurely this isn't just X forwarding over SSH?

It says right on the page. X11 over SSH with optional VirtualGL.

I'm getting a 502 Bad Gateway. But while, we're here, why is Pico limited to 5 clients?

Seems like it's for commercial differentiation:

"TrueOS Pico™ is currently in beta status. The client has experimental support for VirtualGL, and limited sound-forwarding availability. Additionally, there is a limit of 5 concurrent sessions on the server side. Licensing options will be announced at a later date."

Link requires a trailing slash: https://www.trueos.org/trueos-pico/

could some mod fix the link as the trailing slash works

Thanks, updated.

I'd love to see a demo of this so that we could gauge performance and software support.

As the site seems to be down, here's an alternative: http://www.raspbsd.org/

That's not really an alternative. The posted project is a thin client/server setup that just happens to target Raspberry Pi computers.

The Linux equivalent would be something like LTSP (http://www.ltsp.org/)

Oh, I see what you mean. Page finally loaded, thankfully.

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