[Spice-devel] Thin client vendors supporting Spice

Sun Apr 15 14:48:19 PDT 2012

Another avenue of approach is to consider the HP ThinPro series of Thin Clients.  The current x86 line (t55xx series and the gt7725 series) are based on Debian Lenny (v5.x).  It's not difficult to toss a devchain up, use it to compile the spice client, and then use their onboard ThinState utility to save/load the image back to existing clients.  I was able to slipstream a working spice client into a fleet of gt7725s.

For those who are interested in pursuing this, I'll give you guys a few pointers -
a) The gt7725 just got EOLed, and there are vendors on eBay selling them for 1/3 of the original price.   The HP t610 replacement is based on the AMD Fusion APU, will run ThinPro 4 (which is Ubuntu Hardy LTS based) but it is not due until June 2012.  AFAIK the gt7725 is not yet ThinPro 4 compatible...not that I am not hacking it to make it work.

b) HP makes available a ThinPro VMWare image (should be in the T5X31014 (ThinPro 3.1) version.  Download it into a machine running VMWare Player or workstation.  If you got VMWare vDisk SDK, use it to convert the associated VMDK to a single expandable file image.

c) Grab the latest ThinPro release (T6X33009) from HP, use the installer util to obtain the disk image from it (should be a large dd of the squashfs file system), and then load it into a web server (hfs for Windows works, as does lighthttpd for Linux and whathaveyou).  Then within the VM, switch to admin mode, use the ThinState client (under admin tools), restore an image, and point it at the dd file on the web server.  The VM will reboot and go into ThinState recovery mode, pull the dd file from the web server and update the virtual machine.

d) After this is done, the outdated ThinPro VM will be converted to running the latest ThinPro 3.3 OS variant.  Then log back into admin mode, enable its onboard sshd, shell in.

e) Once you are in the shell, uncomment the debian apt repository on /etc/apt/sources.list (debian lenny is EOLed, so you will need to repoint the URLs to archive.debian.org).  Then run fsunlock, apt-get update, install openvn-tools, build-essential packages and load the pre-reqs for compiling the spice client.  Note that debian lenny and Ubuntu Maverick is almost the same, so you can install pre-built packages from Mav and it'll satisfy the build requirements.

f) Once it's built and tested functional, simply use the ThinState tool to create either a bootable USB key or a dd file of the working VM (you'll need to send it to an FTP site), and then use that dd file to load the other clients.  

Attila Sukosd <attila.sukosd at gmail.com> wrote:

>Hi,
>
>As someone already mentioned, Sunrays use their own proprietary protocol
>for the thin client <-> terminal server communication, and running SPICE on
>top of that would not make too much sense in terms of performance.
>
>Although I have not tried Sunray 3, we have been using Sunray 1 & 2s for
>quite a while, and we have not been too impressed by their performance or
>support either.
>
>But thats just my 2 cents. :)
>
>Attila
>
>
>
>On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 6:32 AM, Lubos Kocman <lkocman at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> RAYDESK with KIOSK mode used to be tuned fluxbox with X11 on whatever
>> target the sun ray was connecting to (on Sun Ray 2).
>>
>>
>> Sun ray takes target directly from DHCP macro so there is connection to
>> target immediately after dhcp lease (unless you're not using vpn that takes
>> an extra step).
>>
>> So in your scenario you'd use their protocol to connect to a physical
>> target (or virtualbox target) and then launch SPICE there?
>>
>> That exactly like these advertisements for new televisions "See how
>> beautiful colours has it" which are being played on your TV.
>>
>>
>> Use gtranslate for more information:
>> http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/pr/virtualni-desktop-stickfish-raydesk(Czech)
>>
>>
>> Lubos
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Anthony James" <anthony.james at cintriq.com>
>> To: "Lubos Kocman" <lkocman at redhat.com>, "Scott Glazier" <
>> s.glazier at fugro.com>
>> Cc: spice-devel at lists.freedesktop.org, "Jacek Skowronek" <
>> jacek_skowronek at hotmail.com>
>> Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 2:54:40 PM
>> Subject: RE: [Spice-devel] Thin client vendors supporting Spice
>>
>> Not sure if this helps or not but at a previous employer they were working
>> on setting up the Sun Ray clients in kiosk mode which I believe starts an X
>> session from the Sun Ray Server where the SPICE client would be installed.
>>
>> The project was never finished and my understanding of how Sun Ray works
>> is limited.
>>
>> ________________________________________
>> From: spice-devel-bounces+anthony.james=cintriq.com at lists.freedesktop.org[spice-devel-bounces+anthony.james=
>> cintriq.com at lists.freedesktop.org] on behalf of Lubos Kocman [
>> lkocman at redhat.com]
>> Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 7:58 AM
>> To: Scott Glazier
>> Cc: spice-devel at lists.freedesktop.org; Jacek Skowronek
>> Subject: Re: [Spice-devel] Thin client vendors supporting Spice
>>
>> :-) I'm sure that Sun Ray 3 does not support SPICE. It has just some basic
>> firmware which is launching their client.
>>
>> (I have Sun Ray 2 at home)
>>
>> Lubos
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Scott Glazier" <s.glazier at fugro.com>
>> To: "Jacek Skowronek" <jacek_skowronek at hotmail.com>,
>> spice-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
>> Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 6:33:49 AM
>> Subject: Re: [Spice-devel] Thin client vendors supporting Spice
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Jacek,
>>
>>
>>
>> While this is not an out of the box thin client suggestion, if you wanted
>> to have a customizable environment you could perhaps look at the Zotac Zbox
>> which does do 2560x1600, has a DVI and HDMI port, and can mount on the back
>> of a screen. I purchased a few of these without HDD and setup them to PXE
>> boot a CentOS image which contains the SPICE client, and a script to
>> automatically connected to the relevant VM. The setup is nothing special
>> but it works, and we use SPICE to permanently display a Windows 7 VM at
>> 2650x1600 (amongst others).
>>
>>
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>
>>
>> Scott
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> From: spice-devel-bounces+s.glazier=fugro.com at lists.freedesktop.org[mailto:
>> spice-devel-bounces+s.glazier=fugro.com at lists.freedesktop.org] On Behalf
>> Of Jacek Skowronek
>> Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2012 2:23 PM
>> To: spice-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
>> Subject: Re: [Spice-devel] Thin client vendors supporting Spice
>>
>>
>> Dave and others,
>>
>> Thanks for info on SPICE support in thin client vendors. After some
>> digging this is the status:
>> IGEL has a thin client called UD5 which supports 2560x1600 and supports
>> SPICE
>> The same for Wyse, e.g. for the Z90S7 client.
>>
>> However, both of those do that through DisplayPort and not DVI.
>>
>> 10Zig 6000 series clients appears to support Spice with max 1920x1080
>> resolution.
>>
>> Oracle is an interesting case. Their Sun Ray 3 client appears to support
>> 2560x1600 through DVI.
>> Does anybody know if it supports Spice? It appears to have a somewhat
>> different software architecture
>> (no Linux or Windows as OS, but their own Sun Ray client software).
>>
>> I would appreciate any help and will report back the results of this quest.
>>
>> As noted before we intend to do a hands-on eval of Spice on one of those
>> clients next. This scan is
>> meant to give us the right choice for the test.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Jacek
>>
>>
>> Hi Jacek, this is the reply I got from people who know more than me about
>> the subject. > Hi David, > > Currently, IGEL supports SPICE client on both
>> their Windows and Linux > platforms and of course, SPICE is supported on
>> any other WES7, XPe > Windows-based platform. Wyse will be supporting on
>> their Linux > platform in the near future. > > Specifically for
>> hi-resolution, RHEV 3 supports up to 2560x1600 > resolution. However, I'm
>> not familiar with any thin clients that > support that high natively. I
>> believe IGEL and Wyse both natively > scale to 1920x1200. In addition to
>> the vendors mentioned above, I'm also aware of 10Zig thin clients:
>> http://www.10zig.com/news/press-releases/redhat.php David JackSko píše v
>> Čt 05. 04. 2012 v 21:46 +0200: > Hi, > > We are looking to evaluate SPICE
>> for a product design. Any hints on > which thin client vendors and products
>> support SPICE with high-res > screens? I have seen IGEL supports SPICE and
>> Wyse claims to, but > nothing concrete in terms of models. > > Any help
>> would be very much appreciated... > > Jacek Skowronek > > Architect at
>> Thales > _______________________________________________ > Spice-devel
>> mailing list > Spice-devel at lists.freedesktop.org >
>> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/spice-devel -- David Jaša,
>> RHCE SPICE QE based in Brno GPG Key:     22C33E24 Fingerprint: 513A 060B
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