
TrueOS Pico – FreeBSD ARM/RPi Thin Clients - mboroi
https://www.trueos.org/trueos-pico/
======
snadal
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.

~~~
rahimnathwani
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?

~~~
snadal
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.

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

~~~
rzzzt
VirtualGL is/was used in Bumblebee, the support software for Optimus cards on
Linux: [https://github.com/Bumblebee-
Project/Bumblebee/wiki/FAQ#how-...](https://github.com/Bumblebee-
Project/Bumblebee/wiki/FAQ#how-it-works)

------
Yuioup
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.

------
vjdhama
Google cached page :
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.trueos.org/trueos-
pico/)

------
cyberpunk
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?

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

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

~~~
peller
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."

------
peller
Link requires a trailing slash: [https://www.trueos.org/trueos-
pico/](https://www.trueos.org/trueos-pico/)

~~~
protomyth
could some mod fix the link as the trailing slash works

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

------
snvzz
As the site seems to be down, here's an alternative:
[http://www.raspbsd.org/](http://www.raspbsd.org/)

~~~
voltagex_
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/](http://www.ltsp.org/))

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

