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Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

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Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#31

Post by whalesalad »

beagle3 wrote: post #27
whalesalad wrote: post #19

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…

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…

I should note the same thing happens while hardwired. I definitely wanted to rule it out.

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#32

Post by whalesalad »

deburo wrote: post #30
whalesalad wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RemoteFX is something I had not heard of - will take a look!

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 upg…

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.

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#33

Post by raphinou »

posix_me_less wrote: post #28
raphinou wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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.

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#34

Post by peckrob »

raphinou wrote: post #15
buserror wrote: post #8

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!

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?

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.

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#35

Post by zamadatix »

whalesalad wrote: post #26
tyingq wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, okay. And I guess you've already played with various group policy around compression, gpu acceleration (RemoteFX) , etc, for RDP.

RemoteFX is something I had not heard of - will take a look!

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.

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#36

Post by pjmlp »

whalesalad wrote: post #19

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…

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.

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#37

Post by cat199 »

hedora wrote: post #29

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.

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

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#38

Post by SixThreeOne »

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.

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#39

Post by buserror »

raphinou wrote: post #15
buserror wrote: post #8

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!

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?

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.

Re: Raspberry Pi as x2go “thin” client

#40

Post by gruez »

zamadatix wrote: post #35
whalesalad wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RemoteFX is something I had not heard of - will take a look!

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 R…

Doesn't remote fx require special hardware/os on the host side?
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