Vmware View Thin Client

[Cozzman]

Hoping to develop a slim OS with auto-starting VMWare view client to make inexpensive thin clients for students who can't afford a home computer.  Instead of giving a child an expensive laptop or (almost equally expensive) mobile thin client we can hand them a little black box and a cheap monitor.  I would think we could maybe even scavenge older model laptops and transplant the motherboards and hard drives with this more battery efficient design.  Good projects for the HS tech students.

[greenqloud]

Since VMWare view is commercial software there is probably a slim chance of that happening. Take a look at the Spice protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE_(protocol)

It's open source and HD capable. If anyone wants to collaborate on getting a spice client running R-Pi let me know.

[Cozzman]

They have a VMware view Linux client.  Not sure about ARM support but they are pretty helpful folks if you bring them an idea to use their product more and buy more licenses.

[Cozzman]

Also there is this http://code.google.com/p/vmwar.....en-client/

[Sylvain]

I don't know well VMWAR but with VirtualBox you can take the control of a virtual PC through the standard RDP protocol (no matter what the OS is). So any RPD client should work.

This last days I had this kind of need and I managed to make things work relatively quickly : a 10 years old PC + xubuntu + autologon on a blank xfce desktop + autolaunch of rdesktop. It allows me to manage an XP VM through internet without problem.

It's has be improved (screen res ...) but it works !

Sylvain.

[ncorrare]

I've been playing with spice for a while on x86. I'm not sure about the dependencies in ARM but I've been trying to make it work for a while in qemu. I'll let you know if I make it work.

[Regor]

This is an area I am interested in as well and there is actually an Arm Linux VMWare View Client.

It's currently available from HP for use on the HP t5325 microclient which is an ARM (V5 I think) Thin client based on a Marvell SOC.

HP MicroClient

A download for the client is here 

There are also RDP and Citrix Clients available on this client so these may also be possible but I don't know how binary compatible armV5 and armV6 cpu's are, I'm sure someone here can advise though.

The linux on these is debian based and there may be some useful nuggets on the FTP site where they publish the open source bits of the OS for these Here

Edit: Sorry Cozzman - i had skimmed past your post for some reason. but this may be of interest anyway.

[Ianw]

VNC is one possibility? I have used it on ARM linux to connect to a virtual Xterminal on a linux server and works nicely, not a true thin client but its one way allow access to a VM in a cluster.

[adaack]

I am currently interested in this to replace our over priced thin clients. we run a cirtix Farm and i think it would be great if we could access it form these units.  currently our machines run a windows XPe OS, unfortunately my boss is Anti Linux and i don't see us being able to move forward until a windows ARM solution is available (win8), but i can't wait to see what can be done with this.