Running Raspberry Pis as Thin Clients with Ubuntu 14.04 • Hacker News Board

Re: Running Raspberry Pis as Thin Clients with Ubuntu 14.04

#11

Post by harrylavender » Wed, Sep 10, 2014, 3:36 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #8

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

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.

Re: Running Raspberry Pis as Thin Clients with Ubuntu 14.04

#12

Post by jewel » Wed, Sep 10, 2014, 4:36 PM UTC

morb wrote: post #5

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

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.

Re: Running Raspberry Pis as Thin Clients with Ubuntu 14.04

#13

Post by Maakuth » Wed, Sep 10, 2014, 6:20 PM UTC

morb wrote: post #5

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

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.

Re: Running Raspberry Pis as Thin Clients with Ubuntu 14.04

#14

Post by otterpro » Wed, Sep 10, 2014, 10:38 PM UTC

abcdefidk wrote: post #9

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.

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.