Try ThinLinc free for up to 10 concurrent users! Mention "NetworkChuck" for a special offer when buying licenses: bit.ly/cendio NetworkChuck makes his entire team switch to a single Linux terminal server using ThinLinc! Watch as Chuck's employees remote into the centralized server, transforming their workflow and showcasing the power of Linux. Alongside Chuck, Alex guides you through installing ThinLinc on both client and server sides. See the team in action as Mike creates a Blender model and Florida Nick edits it, all on the terminal server. Whether you're a Linux enthusiast or curious about remote desktop solutions, discover the power of ThinLinc! LINKS / RESOURCES: Every webpage/resource mentioned in the video: academy.networkchuck.com/blog/ThinLincResources Download the Kokey model from printables: www.printables.com/model/938024-beloved-kokey 🔥🔥Join the NetworkChuck Academy!: ntck.co/NCAcademy **Sponsored by Cendio 0:00 - Introduction 0:46 - What is a Terminal Server? 3:30 - What do you need? 4:45 - Installing ThinLinc (Server-side) 8:09 - Adding Users 8:55 - Installing ThinLinc (Client-side) 10:36 - Installing VirtualGL 16:42 - The Team Tries out ThinLinc 18:05 - Who is “Kokey”? 19:22 - Mike Update 20:11 - Web Administration Tool
@BurkenProductions I'm reminded of a quote from Michael Bay, responding to the choice to make Bumblebee a Camaro instead of a Volkswagen Beetle, like in the cartoons: "When YOU make a 'Transformers' movie, you can make Bumblebee whatever car you want. I like Camaro's, so I'm MY movie, he's a Camaro." In other words, it's not YOUR channel. Make your own channel, and you can do whatever you want with it. However, since this is Chucks channel, he can/ will do what he wants with it. I support your decisions @NetworkChuck. Don't listen to the naysayers!!
NetworkChuck: "Lets stop using proprietary Windows and use Linux cause it's free and open!" Also NetworkChuck: Promotes a proprietary, closed-source, paid terminal server alternative that's neither free (except for personal use) nor open ... I was about to say, what a cool solution, then I saw it's proprietary. Sounds like an ad video for that proprietary ***.
OpenSSH (probably just enabling sshd should be enough in most distros) and local users? And/or OpenLDAP (if you want a common users and groups directory server) and TigerVNC (if you really need a GUI). Although to be fair, this would be a little more focused for technical people.
@@qchtohere8636 Don't forget about X tunneling through SSH for the times you need that GUI but don't want the latency of painting a mouse across the screen when remotely connecting from across the globe.
@@Maescool and the useless use of "sudo su -" instead of just prepending just sudo in front of the command or just "sudo -s". I'm using Linux for well over 20 years and I never used "sudo su -".
or have a NixOS installation in which you declaratively set user groups with, for a user named „alice“, `users.users.alice.groups` in `configuration.nix` or a file imported by it.
VNC is better. X over network is awful on any modern DE. Also all that "propietary stuff" does, is packaging it and have a config page. You can do exactly the same manually not having to pay a dime. and is fairly easy in fact.
@@永学 basically the X11 protocol made in the 70 is composed of a server and it's clients, in the early days of unix universities had one server and it's students used it clients( the server being separated from the clients like a central server), and that model stayed the same since them even today with GPU in the same desktop as your monitor(with hacks, a lot of them) but because of that you can have that server in a machine at long distances from you(like your company server), and you having a client in your PC at home, and it's supported natively in ssh(with -x), the problem, it's that slow, old (since the 70th) a lot of security issues, unmaintained, because x11 is dying, etc, but there's a lot of people that insists in using it instead of RDP or VNC because 'reasons', they know that's old, slow and insecure they just refuse to switch, even when there's a perfect replacement called waypipe, that uses the Wayland protocol, instead of the old x11, it has the benefit of having lower latency than RDP/VNC, because it shares the blocks to build the screen and applications not a video stream like RDP/VNC. Keep using RDP or waypipe, don't use the old x11 one, it's not recomended to use any unmaintained program ESPECIALLY one this old.
"Terminal services have been around for a long time" understatement of the century... The first office computers WERE terminal services and for a long period of time in 70/80s most offices WERE terminal services..
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Longer than pc, but it is less than a hundred years. It is starting to be a long time now
The first business computers were quickly organized around closed shop batch-mode processing to maximize utilization of the fabulously expensive hardware. From this we got improved operating systems, and finally, interactive time-sharing systems like MVS with TCAM/TSO or CP/CMS (later VM/CPS) on the IBM mainframe , ITS, WAITS, Multics, and then a second generation of these systems, such as UNIX, VMS, and also specialized word processors like Wang Labs. From there, we had the breakthrough of personal computers, which were eventually networked and used in a client/server architecture.
And later, specially in "nominally" (only) first world countries (I bet in the US, too, in many places and companies).The typical IBM AS/400 serving all the admin employees terminals. I remember that ('95 or so, if I recall well). All those green or orange monitors, the dumb terminals. Oh, and the videotex. And I had to support all of that. Kindda fun times. :D
At 13:09 you can just press CTRL+ALT+F2 - F4 and it'll open another shell on the system, there's no need to login through SSH. When you shut the display manager down the active one(whichever it is) will be inactive. Even if the display manager is running it'll switch to a shell.
So this is basically a 23 minutes cendio commercial, shwing off a single user using blender through the terminal session and claiming that someone else is working in another session (19:55), while proving a few xeconds later that he isn't (20:39 and 20:46). Don't get me wrong: I really love the idea and I really hope this works as promised, but I haven't seen anything that convinces me.
@@MiniKodjo cloud computing is technically almost the exact opposite from mainframes architecturally. The whole point of cloud computing is distributed everything. Every piece being able to be provisioned and released on demand. A mainframe was a monolithic system.
Terminals have primarily been a unix thing. I had a few unix servers at home, with 48+ tty's per server for enduser terminals. I've also seen insanely expensive dual seat sillicon graphics 19" 10U high "desktop" systems. Mainframes don't have users, they have timeslots and batches, no interactivity. You do not work on a mainframe. Only the operator will start your batch. And later you can collect the result.
@@entelin Most cloud computing is just flexible scaling nodes with a pretty conventional load balancer architecture in front. It's distributed computing only in the sense that multiple individual computers and automation are utilized to do one task, not a true distributed architecture where many physical computing devices can be treated like one big logical one.
@@bloepje "Terminals have primarily been a unix thing." WRONG. Long before there was Unix, there was IBM's multi-user, remote terminal-based operating systems: CP-40/CMS, CP-67, VM/370, TSS/360, OS/360 MVT-TSO ("Time Sharing Option"), OS/VS2 SVS-TSO, MVS-TSO, CICS (Transactional system), and Michigan Terminal System ("MTS", non-IBM). All ran on IBM terminals (2740, 2741, 1050 - all "golf ball" type terminals , and 2250 vector graphics terminal).
Ironically you're actually going into the past for this. Before PCs became powerful enough to take over the Enterprise, this is how large businesses used mainframes. It was called Time Sharing. Everyone had a terminal, basically a dumb terminal that connected to a terminal server that connected to a port on the main frame. On the mainframe there would be dozens upon dozens of users each with the illusion that he/she was the only user on the computer. Some systems used UNIX, others used operating systems by DEC like RSTS/E, RSX, VAX/VMS and so on. One problem with this method was that if the computer went down, all of those dozens upon dozens of users I just spoke about would be shit out of luck. So we often had large backup systems the whole thing in a cluster. If one went down, we'd shift all the users to another system. Back then I was writing load balancing software for the mainframes. I dare say it is humorous watching you advocate going back to the same old method in 2024!
Well, with how things are going the goal might be to just sell everyone a rpi or equal and have you subscribe to a virtual machine that is ran from a large datacenter cloud network and then you can subscribe to the os, sub for your allocated gpu, cpu, memory, and storage, subscribe to each application you run and then ultimately.... own nothing.
Love it! Retired dev here. Was a Visual Studio/T-SQL/Oracle developer for 30 years. Been a big fan of your channel for a long time with Raspberry Pi projects! I just dumped Windows because I refuse to buy a new computer just to run Windows 11. Switched to Linux Mint and am very happy!
Yep I agree that 1 action will likely push more to other options than anything in history. Although if I understand right one can still run WIN11 on old hardware. Just can't use the upgrade path. It requires using an install USB and a fresh install of 11...at least for now
I’m with you. I’m a Unix/Linux work related admin/dev from the early 80’s to present and last year dropped W11 for Linux Mint for home. Turned my laptop from a brick to something usable. Probably should’ve did it long ago given my OS and dev experience.
You do know that UNIX/X always supported multiple users connecting from terminals; and back in the 90s and even earlier, this included graphical terminals like NeWS or X11 or Display Postscript (NeXTStep). Not to mention desktop, VNC... All basically because UNIX and Linux are multiuser systems from the ground up. Always have been.
Back around 2000 I was an administrator running a Citrix, so that's 24 years ago and it was awesome. 350 thin clients sitting across about 7 Windows NT 4 terminal server machines with Citrix Metaframe. Upgrade everyone in one night to the latest software, no problem. Roll out that bug fix, no problem. Set up 20 new staff, no problem.
That's awesome. We still use Citrix in our company. Works well enough even with over a thousand users across 60+ servers. Some bugs here and there but overall a solid experience.
@@ninthjake I never operated in that sort of league - but it is a technology when I first saw it I was instantly amazed by how powerful it was at creating centralized distributed infrastructure. Keep it up!!
Most likely the reason you didn't see the pretty window when you went to install ThinLinc is because of that sh you put at the start of the command. You essentially forced the script to use sh as the script interpreter which doesn't have a ton of support for GUI elements. You could have run it by simply typing ./thinlinc-install and the interpreter called out in the script by the installer (most likely bash) would have taken over and ran the install the same way but with the GUI elements if available.
Windows 11 doesn't provide any concurrent remote desktop support. It's in fact explicitly not allowed per the Microsoft license. There are third party apps that would give you access to programs on the Windows 11 machine that would allow concurrent access, but I'm not ware of any that give you the actual desktop to interact with. TSPlus makes programs available via web browser for instance, but not the desktop. VNC lets you access the desktop, and you can configure that to allow multiple connections, but then everyone is sharing the same desktop (they do not all get their own). You can install SSH servers and access programs, but again, no desktop, and no GUI at all unless you also have X forwarding setup (which is possible, but most Windows software isn't going to work that natively).
So as someone who daily drives Linux I'd genuinely recommend using Fedora if your machine is running brand new hardware, which based on the RTX 4090 is probably the case. That's simply because Fedora ships with MUCH newer kernels, meaning it has fixes and improvements for new hardware. It's also, in my experience, rock solid! Also, I just ran glxspheres64 on my RTX 3070 Ti laptop GPU and I'm getting 10x the performance. Please install the Nvidia driver!! I LOVE the cutaways to Florida Nick editing, 10/10
I had a LTSP (Linux Thin Server Project) running for about 5 years at the High School I taught at > 14 years ago. One server ran 20 crappy pc's in the lab. It ran a straight Ubuntu system, totally open source. Short answer, it was great.
10 years ago, gaming on Linux SUCKED, but now we have thousands of Steam games that work fine natively or through Proton. Games not working has been the biggest hurdle to adoption imo. I'm a computer science nerd, but at the end of the day I still need a way to play my favorite games. Add to that way more Windows software works well or at least has a browser app like Office 365, its doable imo. I still want a pure Windows machine for maximum performance and compatibility, but I could survive on Linux
I'm in about the same boat as you, as a Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer. Full Office 365 functionality (especially Outlook) and game compatibility are the only things Windows has going for it anymore. Even Microsoft doesn't care about Windows anymore. The entire OS is as important to their bottom line as computers are to Apple, ie, about a 10% rounding error. The truth MSFT doesn't want most people to know: Azure runs more Linux machines than Windows.
Wow, love the growth Chuck. Been watching since your CBT Nuggets days, it's great to see the channel where it's at now, definitely came a long way. The team looks like they're awesome to work with. Keep it up, love the hustle and determination!
woww did not know he was from cbt nuggets...i loved cbt nuggets! i wonder if i watched chuck all those years ago and didnt realize here he is back again!
There is a classic movie called "Hackers". Please watch that if you haven't already! The weird lanky guy with the braided hair is epic. You will like it. My friends and I recorded it to VHS and would watch it at every LAN party we held at either my parents place, their parents place back in the 2001-2004 period. I love you all. Keep gaming and hacking. Keep having fun.
the terminal instructions sounded a bit off to me... don't get me wrong, it's an amazing video and i'm glad you guys actually show what you're doing but there's a lot of edge cases where cutting corners could cause issues. first, sh ./install-server sounds like a bad idea because the script has a shebang to specify the preferred interpreter and overriding that with sh is almost always a bad idea because that launches a barebones posix shell which can break a lot of stuff. just leave the sh part and instead give the script execute permissions or check the first line to see what interpreter it wants. note that some scripts will incorrectly request sh as interpreter while they should be requesting bash so i'd personally go one step further and run shellcheck on the script just in case. second, dpkg install thinlinc*.deb isn't a problem until you have 2 thinlinc packages in which case it will probably install both. it still shouldn't cause trouble because it'll order alphabetically which effectively results in it starting with the older one but still, best to just specify the one you want instead of using a wildcard. third, sudo su - is a pretty well-known yet useless command, use sudo -i instead. again, amazing video, it's just that i've blindly followed instructions like this before which have caused me varying degrees of pain and i don't want other people to waste their time like that.
I just love how those guys are just fooling around with the tech they have just explained. It makes it even more then a tutoral, cause it although shows courage. Love it.
Oh man, my homelab and personal PC/laptops are all named after things in the Wizarding World NAS is called Gringotts Media server is called Hogsmeade Laptops and PCs are named Cleansweep, Firebolt, and Nimbus And seeing the random Room of Requirement over there was soo cool! Especially when it fits the description so perfectly!
We use HP ThinClients at work, we've been running HP ThinClients for around 20yrs now at least :) Our Terminal Server is a Windows server, always has been. 5 of them in total for around 200 thinclients. I changed 1 of our stores to RPi 3Bs a few years back, worked ok, ran WTWare (when it was free) which was neat, but they actively refused to support several features that we were using from Remote Desktop Connection (Remote Control, Remote Control with differing screen resolutions, etc...) and then it became non-free. Eventually gave up and went back to HP thinclients.
The company I used to work at in the 1990s used thin clients. The boss wanted us to have a silent work environment. It's funny when Windows people discover what Unix had 30 or 40 years ago.
When I moved into this house, I just dumped a ton of boxes of things into the spare bedroom, filling it up, and I'm only this week finally into going through them and getting the room usable, and all the things either where they should have been for 11 years now, or in piles to donate or sell. I've been calling it my Room of Requirement for most of this time, and my Roborock even knows it as that, and knows never to try to burrow in there.
The virtualgl part is kinda mysterious and scary... Does that mean that ThinLinc is only there to establish the connection, but is actually not able to access all the hardware? I don't really understand why not... Or maybe, ThinLinc can access the hardware, and virtualgl is not there to send the graphics, but virtualgl helps split the gpu resource for the different virtualgl users? I don't know...
How cool! And even more so, I'm from Linköping Sweden where Cendio's originated. (Which I did not know before this video) Super awesome video with great sense of humor whilst educating. 😊👌👏🙌
Thank you for sharing, your videos always make me feel very interesting. I have been following you for a long time, haha. Your videos cover a lot about Linux and networking, and I feel that you are a very skilled operations engineer. Your previous video "I build a Raspberry Pi Super Computer," where you take the Raspberry Pi array out of the oven, made me laugh so much, it was hilarious, very impressive. Following your steps, I have learned a lot about Kubernetes technology, and the interspersed Minecraft also makes me feel very familiar, haha. I also set up a Minecraft server on the Raspberry Pi and played with friends. Your videos are always very passionate, haha, and I strongly agree with what you said that everyone should learn Linux! Looking forward to your next masterpiece!
I’ve been a pc user since 1987 and Dos 3.1. After all the MS debacles and security issues I decided to switch over to a version of Linux. I tried mint for my first install and because I’m used to windows I always thought updating Linux was a good thing and didn’t do a backup. Yeah I know thank you. So after a bit more searching I came across a gaming version of Linux Nabora 39. I am pretty happy so far with Nobora so far, I do have a weird issue with the line-in audio but everything else works. I am definitely a noob and not used to the terminal commands, I just use the update feature in Nobora. Maybe in the future I will learn to use terminal commands, but for now it works for me.
*desktop users. this is more of a server. with servers. we're over 70%, same with phones, and with supercomputers we have all of them. (all the ones from top 500 list used for statistics). If you sum up everything (yes chrome os and android too, they may be weird distros, but they're still linux) linux is the most popular os in the world.
Chuck, i like this video nut just because on how to set up terminals and server but because we (at least I) got to know your team. And Chuck, they are good !
As a Filipino who follows Networkchuck, I learned a lot from you about Linux and cybersecurity one of the best channels to learn from and, it's shocking to see a Filipino comic character included in this video, Thank you and, Thank you very much for this meaningful knowledge.
@@mrmotofy And you're welcome to it - but I don't know if I'd assume everyone knows that, you may be surprised what things you think are common knowledge that aren't. Also, even if you know it, an open mind will accept the reminder gladly and grab a glass of water with their next mountain dew :)
just before I graduated(around socket 478 Xeon), I had a teacher buy a dual xeon system with 63gb raid setup and run Redhat(I think Fedora had just come out around this point); had a classroom of like 20something~ IBM Pentium II/III based computers network booting terminal services...... kinda old feature, he also played around with clustering systems before asking the school to help him setup that classroom; ran decently as a concept.... can't recall the GUI but something pretty lightweight ** mysteriously a year later the school took down the lab **cough** MS had provided some funding to the schools locally which may or may not of been part of that decision *cough*.....
I'm using E5 server chips on $80 mobos using recycled server parts. $200 for 12 core CPU, 32 gb ddr4, and mobo. Can't run with the Ryzen 7 5800 I got used for my son, but half the price and more power than I've been able to max. Plus it would thrash on this setup
What does Ubuntu 20.04 offer that 22.04 doesn't? Just trying to understand why would you go so far back, when even 24.04 is out. What are you using that has issues with 22.04? I haven't found any software that doesn't work on 22.04. Now on 24 being so new, that is a different story.
@@tappy8741 sorry without going back to watch it, I didn't realize it was sponsored by the software. Maybe it wasn't even mentioned and that was the purpose for the demonstration. New infrastructure that is going to be EOL in less than a year, has to be the dumbest tutorial. Someone is going to show this to their boss, think it's a great idea and then be screwed in a year.
Actually I wanted to do this thing long time ago. I don't know at that time thinLinc exists or not but I install ubuntu server and ran windows 11 and mac in kvm simultaneously and experimented a lot with kasm workspace. Also created total active directory setup without this ThinLinc. But this thing is so damn good 💥
I'm going to be the grumpy "you changed something about your content" commenter, but the switch between Chuck and Alex throws me off. The energy is way too different, and it kind of makes me just skip past Alex. 😵💫
*Me using openssh and x-fowarding all my stuff with virtual gl for years now* ┬┴┬┴┤(･_├┬┴┬┴ ┬┴┬┴┬┴┬┴┬┴┬┴ ┬┴┬┴┤(･_├┬┴┬┴ Why are we adding third party proprietary software to manage it? We could just create a *"simple"* script that does all the auto setup work on this? And then use something like cockpit to do the web management stuff and permissions? I know I'm not technologically challenged, but implementing a solution like this does imply the person implementing this server must be technologically literate to also secure the server from third parties and make it accessible either over the web or locally only so they gotta have a high skill level in linux to do so and to debug it.
@@jackkraken3888 port forward? At worst it's just local setup + VPN P2P Service of choice or if your router /modem already has one integrated just using that. I already have everything from SSL certificates to DNS setup so its not a hassle for me to setup everything. For other people however setting up the x forwarding and acceleration is the hard part the VPN bit isn't that much harder as solutions like Nebula and Tailscale exist. Honestly there's no one size fits all solution to this problem what you save in setup time you lose in security. I don't like , personally that is, adding solutions that are jumbles of other software cobbled together from multiple other softwares that have a history of not playing nice. I'd much rather learn the arcane tecnobable lore and setup my scripts and incantations while consuming intense and holy oils at ridiculous rates to please the machine spirit. Jokes aside stuff like this breaks hard and fast and doesn't have enough verbosity to diagnose it's individual components when it does, and then you're stuck asking for tech support from a company that's not up scale yet and is helping multiple other clients while you are Number XY in the Z queue with ∆ people ahead of you, while the anxiety devours your mind flesh and business alive.
I think because spinning up VMs instead of user Sessions requires SR-IOV, which is sadly not on consumer GPUs and an upsell for enterprise hardware (even though consumer cards are technically capable to handle such loads).
@@bluefrancis14 There's definitely GPU passthrough, so I assume PCIE passthrough is a thing as well. SomeOrdinaryGamers showed a similar thing when creating a VM with GPU capabilities for running certain windows games through a VM, so I'm not sure if that would fit what you're looking for
Cool concept and love the goofy humor and interesting fun-facts about that Kokey included 😻- but I had to giggle when I saw you guys making the same mistake I made when first using Linux (also Ubuntu and it was crap in hindsight): downloading from a Website instead of the Repositories... 😉 Ah yeah, the old Windows-habits aren't easy to get rid of at the start, I know 😏 - Using the Repository to install stuff might have also made the path-resolve unnecessary since the Installation scripts usually are pretty well designed to include such default necessities 😉 P.S.: How long did you take to get the NVIDIA Drivers to run on Linux/Ubuntu?😏🤔 - Or were they not necessary (which would be strange and I'd be curious as to how and why)?
15 years ago I was working at a place where we moved most of our users of to thin clients. If a user clicked on malware, all they'd have to do is close the session and log on again. 4 years ago i heard from a former co-worker that the company was switching away from thin clients. They experienced some catastrophic failures at the server and core switch level, which in turn caused every terminal services user to be dead in the water.
We need a way for people impacted by Big Tech layoffs to use their skills for Linux, like a GoFundMe crowdsourcing thing. So people can get paid to help develop Linux and open-source alternatives to Adobe!
i made an "everything" pc with a 7950x, 4080, 32gb of ddr5 6000 sweet spot ram and targeting 1440p for entertainment purposes. I built this to do the highest end gaming, but also because i wanted a pc strong enough to run actual engineering and 3d rendering software with ease and for years going into the future. My sister wants to make games and her bf wants to help her. considering you can just buy a prefab setup where you only really need to add in your own assets, dialogue, levels, etc.. this whole everything here you're putting on YT would make it super easy for us to collaborate. Bonus is we all have good systems of our own. Sis has a 3950x and a 3060ti, her bf has a 5800x3d and a 4080 also. we can literally render anything between the 3 of us lol.
@@as8kay Gentoo. Seriously though, Mint would probably be best thanks to its simplicity. You can get lighter distros, but someone "not so techy" probably wouldn't know how to best take advantage of them, if you could use it at all.
Another option is to have a multi seat setup using loginctl. The screens are directly connected to the graphics cards and you can use an independent USB switch per user. Pro: no need for network connection, you are really directly logged in to the pc Con: because you're directly connected instead of using a network, the range is more limited.
wth why are you using sysv init style commands instead of systemctl? I'm sure that gdm3 path is just an alias or symlink to systemctl but why use it when you have systemd? systemctl stop gdm3 or systemctl disable --now gdm3 Not angry. Just surprised and confused o_O
