After contemplating the RPi setup that I have, it occurred to me that if I sacrifice one of the three RPis that I own, I could setup a rather nice little Thin Client. This makes a whole lot of sense because I can use the Thin Client to get into pretty much anything in my home network, including the other RPis. I took a look at the Raspberry Pi Thin Client project and made a determination that it would supply most of my needs. It also happens to have a very tiny image that I was able to download.
Well, I downloaded the RPi thin client from Google drive and placed it onto a 2GB SD card last night. I did not have much of a chance to try it out until this morning before going to work. I did bump into an obvious problem, I didn't know how to use pretty much any of the tools in the image. That will be my next challenge. I know that I need to be able to do RDP, VNC, and probably XWindows. I would really like to use the Thin Client to do XWindows. Right now, I was very pleased to see that the system came up without a hitch. I had reformatted the SD Card from my Mac prior to loading the thin client image.
I can foresee using the Thin Client to be able to access the two remaining RPis, my Mac Mini, any one of several VMs running in the Mac Mini, my work laptop, the home laptop, the WMC computer, and other servers in the house as well as external servers that I am in charge of. This would be a great way to access these elements. However, I do see a problem in the meantime because there is no X11 acceleration in the image, but that has been promised. Cudos to the Thin Client project for the work done thus far.
This is a blog mostly about techie things, what I am doing to my apartment network on the cheap, IOT, 3D Printing, Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, ESP32, ESP8266, Home Automation, Personal Weather Stations, Things That Go Bump in the Night, and some side issues that need discussing. Remember, sometimes the journey to an end is as much fun as the goal achieved!
