The Raspberry Pi is now a threat to thin clients.
Citrix has been fooling around with the Pi as a desktop virtualisation (VDI) target for a while, even releasing a prototype Citrix Receiver for the little computers. That effort was in early 2014.
Citrix has since decided it was inefficient to put a lot of effort into creating a special version of Receiver for one device, so instead set to "working with the Pi Organization to ensure our existing Linux Receiver would work with their new Pi2 architecture and supported OS images."
The result of that effort, the company blogged last Friday, is that in "XenDesktop/XenApp 7.6 FP3 and the new HDX Thinwire compatibility codec, we ... had a codec that would perform efficiently on the Pi2 without the need for hardware accelerated plugins."
This thin client is wafer-thin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @09:17AM
You don't say! What's next, a WEB SERVER that runs on a PHONE????
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Tuesday December 15 2015, @09:38AM
That's crazy talk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @10:58AM
I think the key word is "efficiently". After all, the RPi isn't exactly known for its superior performance.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday December 15 2015, @10:56AM
I'm hoping they took some time to actually make some improvements to their Linux receiver. It kind of sucked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @11:51AM
But Windows! Business! Windows! CIO PHB Cloud Azure Technology going forward paradigm!
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday December 15 2015, @01:12PM
I'm sorry but that was a poor sales pitch: Not enough buzzwords.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 15 2015, @01:27PM
It sucks just as well on Pi as it ever did on Linux.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday December 15 2015, @03:10PM
Nice.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by hogger on Tuesday December 15 2015, @03:22PM
I use it almost daily on 64bit Debian. I just installed the latest one (13.2.1) yesterday via their deb file. It installed and worked ok. What prompted me to get the latest version was an upgrade of my kernel to 4.x, and moving citrix apps across the screen was leaving trails. I'd never had that problem with my old 3.13.x kernel. The new receiver doesn't really seem much different, maybe slightly faster, the screen trails problem seems to be fixed. I don't have any qualms with the Linux receiver. It works just fine for me. I'm just happy I don't have to run windows when working from home.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday December 15 2015, @04:17PM
I used to use it, but dumped it when I got VPN access. It was a pain to install (at the time), especially in 64 bit, slow, but it was fairly reliable.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 16 2015, @06:47PM
Can't be much worse than the Windows one, can it? I have to use that thing on a daily basis, and just moving a window often takes 30-60 seconds to respond. I've had better results using VNC from a different continent...
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday December 16 2015, @08:15PM
Oh, it's better than that, but I would assume it's more bandwidth and latency based for problems of that sort.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 16 2015, @08:24PM
Yeah probably. Pretty sure the server is *right freakin downstairs* though. But since they can't even manage to allocate sufficient capacity of office chairs, it's likely they haven't allocated sufficient capacity on that server either :)
(Score: 2) by Urlax on Tuesday December 15 2015, @06:40PM
i really hope that this will inspire some monitor maker to include room for raspberry pi compute module.
you could switch the monitors USB hub between the PC and the OTG port of the PI: Instant KVM.
since the PI2's ethernet port is usb-to-ethernet anyway, you could hook it to the network using an external adapter and have a thin client INSIDE the monitor.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday December 15 2015, @07:36PM
On the other hand, the pie is so small that it can hang from the HDMI cable, get power from the USB port, and be totally invisible behind the TV.
IMHO, the last thing we need is another expensive option in a TV for something as fleeting as some particular version of a Raspberry Pi. You won't be able to buy any of the current Pi models in 3 years.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @07:59PM
With recent embedded processors becoming mainstream and powerful enough for general-purpose computing, the Embedded Open Modular Architecture is an initiative to create robust, reliable and interoperable hardware standards for mass-volume systems based around embedded processors, where average users can interchange system modules (containing processor, RAM and storage), even several times a day, without risk of damage, needing any technical knowledge or requiring a technician to assist them.
Products based on EOMA standards should, when sold, be so simple that any salesman can honestly say "Just plug it in: it will work", and where anyone from a small child to an elderly person may be confident in the day-to-day installation, removal and use of EOMA modules in the Electronic Appliances that they own. By complete contrast to existing Industry Standards, there does not exist even a single published open standard which can claim that it is easy for the general public to work with. To explain this puzzling statement further: all other standards require either special technical knowledge, special technical skills, special handling of the device so as not to damage it, and often tools are required. EOMA Standards are designed to require none of these things.
The first initiative is to re-use the old PCMCIA form-factor, in a similar way to Conditional Access Modules [wikipedia.org]. Below, various alternative interfaces are analysed, and thus explain, given the requirements, why PCMCIA was chosen as the first preferred modular format, despite the greatly-reduced pin-count (only 68 pins).
(Score: 2) by black6host on Tuesday December 15 2015, @09:03PM
I think a few of us know the disaster caused by a wafer-thin mint. What could go wrong with a wafer-thin client? :)