Hey it's my project! Great to see someone going over this, and it's neat to see it in action! Looks like I need to figure out why the window isn't centering on Debian...
@@pokkanvpj As this uses virt-viewer under the hood you shouldn't have any issue with video streaming so long as you set the VM parameters correctly. The VDI client simply provides an easy to use interface for logging into Proxmox to connect to the VM.
I prefer for users just to connect using VNC to their desktop session (each user with own vm). Spice it has its uses, but I find vnc with tigervnc more efficient in general. I use spice or just proxmox console itself just for administration of vms, occasional reboot if they are stuck. So most users do not even have permissions to log to proxmox UI or anything. I mean, it is not a bad idea. It works, but I do not find it adding a lot.
I still think it would be worthwhile to combine this with an LTSP PXE boot server for the thin-client images, especially now that they could all be identical. LTSP provides a ready-made framework to boot a single image on multiple machines, and also would allow a great degree of administrator oversight/assistance to users through it's remote management. This would free you of the need to even have storage in your thin clients at all.
I agree that PXE is the answer and I'm sure it'll end up in a future episode of this series. I'm still experimenting with LTSP to decide if it's the path I want to go down or not, since I don't really need much of a boot image or NFS-mounted root for a thin client appliance.
@@apalrdsadventures The best way is likely going to be to build a custom debian live environment and pxe boot that. The trick being that a live environment doesn't expect persistence, but an installed system obviously does. So if you have more than one client and the boot image isn''t based on a live image or set up with RO root, they will try to get exclusive locks on certain files during boot, and all your clients after the initial one will fail to boot.
@@apalrdsadventures This is essentially what LTSP with squashfs images served over NBD does. The "master" image is immutable (unless you repack it from the base image or the server itself, depending how you setup your install). Everytime a client boots up, it starts off with a fresh unmodified copy of it, and you can further "personalize" individual clients by the MAC address if you want, there's a lot of options. You can enable SFTP for /home directories, or disable it entirely. Many different ways to go about it. I've used LTSP for both kiosks and classroom computers in the past, and I think I was only scratching the surface of what it could do.
I'm starting to play with it to understand how useful it will be in this case. My next episode on this series will certainly be about netbooting, although I'm currently focused on this and next week's videos. Maybe I'll do it with LTSP and then later without, since plenty of people would find a LTSP-booted client running locally just as useful as a true thin client running a remote session.
Thanks for making this video. I've been thinking about how to do this. My kids play a lot of XP and old windows games. Instead of them fighting over the computer, I have been thinking about setting up VMs for them instead. Then I can also remotely control things, like if the VMs are on or off.
Hi, my name is Raul Junior; I couldn't find his name, very interesting, from what I've seen I can make it run on an old PC with Windows because it was developed in Python... Very cool project! I'm Brazilian, I don't speak English! Congratulations for the video and thanks for sharing your knowledge... I have Proxmox in production and also in the Lab, and I've been looking for something along these lines for some time! As soon as I have some free time I'll test it and post feedback here in the comments!
You do a very good job, and Thanks for the post as well. I built one in my homelab in about 40 minutes total time. Awesome job thank you again. By the way in nano you can use ctrl-w to searh the file for a word.
Amazing! This will be SO FREAKING USEFUL! I hope I can put Debian in two old 32 bit atom thin clients I have. The kids love them and think they're cute.
Great tutorial but no matter what I do, I always boot into the lxde desktop. I looked at the blog post and it seems that there is a bit of a difference in instructions. I tried both and still keep getting logged into LXDE. Any pointers on what could be the reason?
Hi, everything is very well explained, I was looking for something like that, but my question is if you can virtualize some machines in Windows 10? Does it have any minimum requirements for Windows? Another question is, can you modify where the login is, which when entering the name? username and password enter automatically if you click connect? I remain attentive to your comments, and if possible, could you teach my question how to modify it, best regards
I have followed the instructions but I am getting the following error when I select the VE to launch --- Unable to connect to graphic server - could not connect to proxy server 23.217.138.110: Connection refused. both the Debian client and the PVE server are on the same network. Thank you in advance for any assistance.
Great to see :) I have a question. How do you make this so multiple people can login from thin client in an office environment? Can they access it via a browser internaly?
Thanks for the video my friend! I am wondering if there is a typo on your post for the raspberry pi. The line "mkdir -p ~/.profile/lxsession/LXDE" should have .config instead of .profile right? :-)
I have a 9 cluster raspberry pi 5 and 4 proxmox setup now, just seeing the best way I can serve it out as a vdi cluster through a website to allow login sessions to different vdi vm's, am looking at trying to serve out chromiumOS/chromeOS out as a vdi session to zero clients or again through a web site in my house.
Thanks for the great video. Unfortunately, I have the problem that moving the windows is slow as hell. What could be the problem? With the Spice Cleint out of Proxmox it is better but not perfect either.
Thanks you for the great work you done for the VDI client , i created 5 VDI clients in a small lab connected to a proxmox cluster , it all works great except for some perfomance issues. (1) when i try to maximize the yuotube screen , the screen on the client freezes and display fragments of the youtube movie. (2) sometimes audio and video on a youtube movie are out of sync. i need to reboot the thin Client to get it right again. Is this anything you have seen before ? Does this need parameters to be tuned ?
OK, i had a few days to have my ways with this program and methods,can we please get an clean rdp promt on linux startup(preferably and iso) so we can only insert user name and password and get served our preconfigured vms through RDP? also thanks a lot for the amazing content, been a reaaaal linux learning experience for me myself
Apalrd, Ty for nice video. My company has a need to setup Win VMs on a server and login from different hospitals over the internet. Do you do consulting work?
Hello aparld,thank you for great tutorial,just followed your video and everything working great.Did you try usb redirect with alpine thinclient?I did some change on ini file like enable-usbredir = true,but it wont run.
I have a request: when demoing in a term session, can you please, please increase the font size? At best it is difficult to read and there was one term where it was impossible.
Today i saw this problem. When i open Blender 3D via Spice Remote Desktop. Blender 3D use 100% CPU. But everything ok if i use VM Directly, dont via Spice protocol Can we fix it?
Can something similar be done using containers in Docker Swarm so you can achieve zero downtime HA? Thin clients with high availability would be awesome!
Definitely not an IBM lol it's a super cheap Amazon keyboard + trackpad I've had for around a decade to use with Pi's. But I do have a Unicomp IBM replica with buckling spring switches I use for script writing and editing, not in the video.
vdiclient can certainly do office work and internet. Full screen video sometimes looks bad due to being rendered on the server and then compressed again to send over the network.
Any OS that Proxmox can virtualize be used this way, so you'd just need to setup Windows 10 there instead of Ubuntu. I don't usually do this since my Proxmox server doesn't have enough RAM for another Windows VM with everything I'm already running. But it absolutely works with Windows 10 on the VM side. On the client side it's an appliance so the OS doesn't really matter, you shouldn't be interacting with the client's underlying OS (at least as a thin client). But the Python tool does run on Windows and there are install instructions along with it on Github.
I stuck with Desktop since it makes audio easier in this case, but eventually we're going back to a bare bare minimum setup when I bring PXE into the mix.
@@apalrdsadventures Thats right. For some audio ist not working even some settings. PXE ? I have PXE on my server. I am interessted in this. Will be nice.
Raspberry Pi defaults to audio on the analog port instead of HDMI. If you change the audio settings on Desktop before you delete the desktop configuration, those settings should persist and all should work. PXE is currently in progress on my end, so not coming out in the next week or two, but it's a key goal for my overall thin client project
Hi , what about graphic intensive application? Spice could support a user experience like a normal pc? I’m asking this because we could have 10 users to transition to vdi but other solution are complex and very high price. What about also a network bandwidth consumption on lan and over internet for 1 user? Thanks
It depends. SPICE's video compression is generally good for things that aren't heavily moving (it prioritizes quality / fine detail like fonts over framerate). Bandwidth isn't bad, but it's quite latency sensitive, so over the internet won't be a perfect experience.
I have diskless Axel M80 thin clients that I would like to hook up. Would it be possible to configure the imbedded Citrix VDI in a Box authorisation screens to match the Proxmox server-side requirements?
The SPICE protocol used by kvm / Proxmox doesn't appear to be supported there. You can use VNC, although support in Proxmox is lower than SPICE (it's not available via the API, you have to add it to VM configs manually, and there is no TLS proxy / Proxmox-based authentication)
I tried to install VDI-Client using Debian11 Buleseye and couldn't connect to the server, but I managed to connect according to your Raspberry Pi tutorial, so I think it's an OS problem.
Thank you for your reply, now there is such an error：“Unable to connect to the graphic server - ” SPICE proxy:Error resolving "PVE01-TEST.local":Name or service not known
PVE returns the DNS name of itself as the SPICE server, so if your network doesn't resolve PVE's DNS name you have to add an entry in the client config file section [SpiceProxyRedirect] to rewrite the name PVE returns into something else (like its IP address). github.com/joshpatten/PVE-VDIClient/blob/main/vdiclient.ini.example
@@apalrdsadventures Hi, I'm following your tutorials on thin clients using the raspberry very carefully. I have the same problem mentioned by dh s. below my vdiclient.ini file [General] title = apalrd VDI icon=vdiicon.ico logo=vdilogo.png kiosk=false [Authentication] auth_backend=pve auth_totp=false tls_verify=false [Hosts] 192.168.1.22 = 8006 pve.pino.local = 8006 [SpiceProxyRedirect] pve.pino.local:3128 = 192.168.1.250:6000 iAt the moment I try to connect with the virtual machine, a window opens with the following error: Unable to connect to prozy server 123.123.123.123:I/O on socket expired. Returning to my vdiclient ini file in the [SpiceProxyRedirect] section what am I wrong? what IP address should I put to redirect host? Thanks anyway for your tutorials and I hope you answer me Pino Patanè
Thank you so much for sharing. Now there is a problem. Playing video is very dependent on the performance of the thin client. Can it be optimized? Looking forward to your reply!
You can try enabling video streaming mode on the Proxmox side (it's in the VM configuration, under Options -> SPICE Enhancements). This will make it use a JPEG-like algorithm when there is a lot of movement vs the normal PNG-like lossless algorithm. However, SPICE is ultimately going to drop frames to maintain quality (non-video mode) or drop quality to maintain frames (video mode), so quality will suffer a lot playing video in video mode.
@@apalrdsadventures Thank you for your reply! I tried SPICE Enhancements. When enabled, the video playback screen will tear. Can GStreamer algorithms be used on Proxmox? Have you tried it?
SPICE only supports those the three modes (off/all/filter), which either uses the lossless compression, lossy compression, or switches dynamically based on motion. In general it's just not a great protocol for video streaming, though, since it's focused on high image quality. As to the network speed, that's not directly limited by either Proxmox or the client.
@@apalrdsadventures When monitoring the thin client traffic, I found that the maximum traffic is 30M. Could this be the reason for the screen tearing? I use the SPICE client to connect under windows, and the traffic will reach 400M (at 1080P resolution).
Given that proxmox 8.1.4 has already active directory integration (LDAP realm is configured) can PVE-VDIClient support that LDAP Realm ? Can I simply set the auth_backend=ldap ?
Probably not via Spice. Too much Latency. You could use Parsec. They where bought up tho and it really bugs me, that they have now a premium option too, which means the free tier is limited to 4:2:0 colorspace and some other small limitations. Doesnt really matter for Gaming, but you can see the difference in pretty Games like RDR2 or similar.
SPICE normally does lossless regional compression which works terribly for games, but in video compression mode it's a bit better for framerate. Another issue you'll have is that SPICE is emulating a VGA card, so the VM will have an emulated low end VGA card + passed-through high end GPU and sometimes it doesn't like drawing with 3D acceleration on the unaccelerated card.
Hi, thaks for share your knolege, you have a very good tutorials about Proxmox Now, I have a question how make windows have the maximum resolution for my monitor, only have this when I access to the VM via RDP from my Windows 10, but when I use SPICE only one time had the maximum resolution after restart the VM windows only have 1024x728 in the resolution. I ran SPICE from my Debian ... Thanks in advance for your support
You probably need to install the SPICE guest drivers (www.spice-space.org/download/windows/spice-guest-tools/spice-guest-tools-latest.exe), otherwise Windows will be in VGA compatibility mode.
Hello! I have a Win10 in Proxmox with multiple user accounts. Is there a method to login with a user to his/her corresponding account on that Win10 VM?
Does the desktop environment matter? I keep getting an "cannot connect to graphic server" error after attempting to connect to one of my VMs. Also absolutely love your thin client experiments, they've been extremely helpful.
On the VM, no, it shouldn't matter. Does it work if you use remote-viewer manually (clicking the SPICE button in the Proxmox web UI on your workstation)? It's also possible you need a proxy entry in the vdiclient config, since by default the Proxmox server returns its own FQDN instead of IP address, and if your network can't resolve that name then it won't connect.
@Husky IT I got mine to work tonight using the comments from "dh s" in this comment section. Look in the example ini file for the spice proxy settings. I had to add my proxmox server IP address with the 3128 port equalling whatever the spice proxy was trying to connect with (something like NODE_NAME:3128). Hopefully the comments below help.
The VMs on Proxmox can run Windows, so the thin client can access any VMs which Proxmox can run. The Python client also runs on Windows natively (there's a bit of a guide on the Github page), if you want to use it on your workstation.
Hi, i follower your tutorial and everything works but when I try to connect to the vm I get unable to connect to the graphical server error. Does annone know how to solve it? Please, I really need it. thanks in advice
Yes! It'll open the client fullscreen, but you can hover at the top center to bring the menu down and make it un-fullscreen and from there the VM list is still open in the background.
On Proxmox? Proxmox uses LXC, but manages it with its UI. You don't get a display device with LXC though, unless you setup an X server with RDP or VNC.
@@apalrdsadventures No, I meant LXD. I love Proxmox, but for me the main problem with it is that it's locked into using Debian for the host OS, whereas the snap version of LXD can run on just about any distro or OS and provides more or less the same functionality as Proxmox, minus a GUI.
@@apalrdsadventures Sure, but I can't run a VM/CT cluster on anything but Debian hosts. Right now I have a LXD cluster running on my Manjaro laptop, a Ubuntu desktop miniPC and the third node on a Proxmox managed Ubuntu VM. I think it's also possible to run a snap based LXD on Windows and Mac too... and Alpine, or a PI running any OS that supports snapd.
Man I just built a server. I am running TrueNAS scale (for now). I really need to figure this out for TrueNAS so I can use a fe wPi thin clients and reclaim some hardware from around the house.
In theory you should be able to setup the QXL backend for kvm, but TrueNAS doesn't have the same SPICE proxy / authentication setup that Proxmox does so you wont be able to use exactly the same script. The TrueNAS guys are also really irritatingly bent on not allowing absolutely any changes to the host system (they disabled apt in the final SCALE release because they don't want anyone touching their perfect system), whereas Proxmox is much more open about it being a Debian system and using Debian management tools is perfectly normal.
@@apalrdsadventures darn. So my home lab has 1 system. 6c/12t cpu, 32gb ram, 5x 4TB HDDs and 1x 120gb SSD for os. My wants/needs, run some VMs, some containers (kube?) and most importantly a NAS. I am not sold on a solution yet. Suggestions?
I use Proxmox and TrueNAS on different hardware. At this point, if I had a single system, I would use Proxmox and either manage Samba through the command line or install an additional web GUI on the Proxmox host to manage it. But I also feel confident in manually managing Samba without a GUI since I did it before TrueNAS for a few years. Proxmox does LXC containers instead of Docker/Kubernetes, which are more similar to mini-VMs. They have their own IP addresses and root filesystems and you can login to them normally and use them like a normal console operating system. I prefer these over Docker for my use cases, I'm not a docker fan at all really. But they (Proxmox) also aren't dicks about you using the host for things the host wasn't designed for (such as running Samba on the host OS) as long as you don't complain about it not working right on the forums (TrueNAS removed apt so you can't use it for anything else in the host OS). They fully support ZFS, and also allow you to install the OS on data drives (make sure you select ZFS in the installer! If you have a single disk select 'raid0') You could install Proxmox using ZFS on the 120G drive (and still use the free space for VMs/CTs!) and import the existing pool from TrueNAS as a second pool. You'll probably have to reset file permissions since the same users won't exist in the new system. A final option you have is to install an LXC container for file sharing, using bind mounts of the zfs datasets you want to share, and use one of the tutorials other people have shared to use Alpine Linux or something like that, so you get a bit more guidance than yoloing a smb.conf on the Proxmox host.
@@apalrdsadventures spice would be nice as well. Just a thought. Sadly my present connection has proxmox behind a nat gateway I don't have control of. So I have limited access to its exposed ports.
Basically LXC is a process namespace and not a fully emulated machine, so you can either attach physical hardware to it or run purely software solution on your own in the container. There is no hardware emulation daemon for containers like qemu for VMs.
Wonderful video and everything's working as expected.. Except the last part unfortunately, i don't know why. But only the autologin is working. When i reboot, i still have the LXDE desktop and the script to start the vdiclient is not working. Any idea why ? Thanks you ! PS : I'm on Debian 11
If you have a user autostart file in the right place, it should run that. Verify the paths (they are different for Pi vs regular Debian), it should be ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart and it should be empty other than the one line to call the thin client script. The system autostart should also be emptied (/etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart). If you get to a point where the LXDE desktop is gone but the vdiclient isn't starting, you can right click and open a terminal and then try to run the script manually
@@apalrdsadventures Thanks answering, yes like you said in ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart there is only the line we added. And autostart in /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/ it's empty too. Even the LXDE desktop boot normally, it's almost like nothing i did worked for the last part.. I will try on other distribution in case it's working.
Well that's curious. Are you actually running LXDE? Try opening a console from the desktop and running 'killall lxsession' and see if it logs you out. If it doesn't, it's not an LXDE session and that's the issue. Lubuntu switched from LXDE to LXQT, so the same autostart trick won't work there.
@@apalrdsadventures So that's very strange... It log me out when i did your command and login back not with my normal user account but with the root, everything worked perfectly... Then i did again a killall lxsession et try to log this time with the non root account and nothing was working. The user is in sudoers so it's not a right issue i think...
Try with a fresh Debian install? Make sure you select only LXDE as the desktop environment (deselect GNOME) in the installer. It sounds like you may have multiple desktops installed, which is not unusual on a Linux system.
Unable to connect to the graphic server Could no connect proxy server xxxxxx:socket i/o timed out I dont know why it always show my like that. helpme! plz!
This means that the client cannot access the server at the address listed in that message. So either the Proxmox server returned a DNS name and the client can't resolve it, or the client is being blocked by a firewall somehow. You can add the Proxmox server's address to /etc/hosts, add it to your DNS server, or edit the vdiclient ini file to map the old address to the IP.
@@apalrdsadventures My ip dress to open Proxmox in web browser Is: 192.168.1.100:8006 In my vdiclient.ini: [hosts] 192.168.1.100=8006 Did I do something wrong? Thank you!
@@apalrdsadventures For clearly i type here: GNU nano 7.2. /etc/hosts *: 127.0.0.1 localhost. localdomain localhost 192.168.1.100 aatee01. education.branch2 hatde01 ------------------------ vdiclient.ini: [General] title = apalrd VDI icon=vdiicon.1co Logo=vd1 logo.png kiosk=false [Authentication] auth_backend=pve auth_totp=false t ls_verify=false [Hosts) 192.168.1.100 =8006 Plz tell me if i have any problem
The graphic server will use what Proxmox believes its domain name to be, which is not an IP address. The error message will tell you the address it's trying to use and it's trying to resolve it via DNS. The [hosts] directive in the ini is what IP to use to connect to the API, but the API returns the graphic sever config file so it doesn't use the same IP you used to connect.
@@apalrdsadventures Thanks for you help! Currently my lines of code are like this, Where should the IP from the error message be filled in here? GNU nano 7.2. /etc/hosts *: 127.0.0.1 localhost. localdomain localhost 192.168.1.100 aatee01. education.branch2 hatde01 ------------------------ vdiclient.ini: [Hosts) 192.168.1.100 =8006
Anyone managed to pass through a USB device from a Windows 10 client to a Linux VM? My spice client on Windows crashes the second I try to redirect a usb device. 😕 I installed the remote viewer and the spice usb drivers on my Win10
It's a known bug gitlab.com/virt-viewer/virt-viewer/-/issues/61 You install version 10 (latest is 11), then copy libusb.dll from the older version to the newer one.
Hi, thanks for the videos, also i have this error, I can't connect to the VM: Could not connect to the graphical server. SPICE proxy: Error resolving pve.local: Unknown name or service Thanks for help.
the Proxmox server thinks it's DNS name is pve.local and that can't be resolved by the client .local is reserved for mdns, so you either need to change the name to something which the client can resolve or add a [SpiceProxyRedirect] rule on the client
It supports any virtual machine that Proxmox does, although there are only QXL guest drivers available for Linux and Windows. Other OSes work in VGA emulation.
It does work on Windows, but there is no macos version. www.spice-space.org/download.html has the info you need (you just need virt-viewer unless you want to do USB redirection)
This doesn't require any software to be installed on the VM, so it works with any OS. It also supports arbitrary USB redirection, which no other remote access protocol has.
6 місяців тому
now boot into the pie via PXE and power it via POE. 😂
Hi i seen to ve having an error when i tried to install the pip3 line that had proxmoxer and pysimpleguiqt, i get a message saying that error: externally managed environment, This is on Debian 12, also had a not about using yhe break sustem packages override, os thsre a way ro fix this by any chance.
For anyone that wants to go back to autostart config from RPi, and might have deleted the default config: Under the folder: cd /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi nano autostart @lxpanel --profile LXDE-pi @pcmanfm --desktop --profile LXDE-pi @xscreensaver -no-splash
Three questions: 1) Can you launch multiple VMs simultaneously? 2) Do you HAVE to install a desktop environment for this to work? (i.e. if I do a "base" Debian install without a desktop environment, will this still work?) 3) Is the performance of this solution fast enough that I would be able to game with this? Or will that depend on the processing capability of my thin client? (i.e. will the video be drawn on the passed through GPU or will it be drawn/rendered on the thin client?) (sidebar: In watching this video, what I am thinking of doing is actually having my thin clients boot remotely, over PXE into this. So I will set up a VM in Proxmox that will be the PXE boot server that will serve up the thin client OS image, that will then take it straight into this login/VDI menu. If it works as shown, in theory, either I can have multiple users logging into my Proxmox server simultaneously, to be able to get access to the other VMs OR, what would be even better is that the same user can log in multiple times, and be able to call up different VMs via different thin clients.)
1. You can connect to multiple VMs simultaneously as a single user, and if you use fullscreen mode instead of kiosk mode, you can do multiple sessions on the same thin client (but they will open full screen, so you'd need to un-fullscreen them). Only one session can be open to each VM at a time, regardless of users. 2. No, you don't need a desktop environment, but you do need a SPICE graphics adapter on the VM, so no serial terminals. Without a desktop it will draw a text terminal graphically. 3. Gaming is ... not ideal. The compression algorithms used by SPICE really prioritize quality over framerate, using something similar to PNG compression. You can switch to video-mode, which uses a lossy compression similar to JPEG and then eventually switches back when activity drops, but visual quality is quite bad as it tries to handle higher framerates. It's fairly comparable to RDP without any client-side rendering. sidebar: I have a pair of videos on exactly this setup, one setting up a PXE server and one setting up the client template There's no limit to how many times a single account can log in to the server, only a limit of 1 client per VM at a time.
@@apalrdsadventures 1. Thank you. I'll have to research how to open a VM in kiosk mode rather than full screen mode. 2. "Without a desktop it will draw a text terminal graphically." So...in the video/example that you showed here - it was able to pull up the Ubuntu desktop, but that was also because you were logging in via the Debian LXDE desktop environment. If I *didn't* install any desktop environment, will I still be able to see the Ubuntu Desktop or no? 3. If I want to game on a Proxmox server which is hosting the gaming VM, what would be the better way for me to connect to said gaming VM them? (if that is a really dumb idea -- that's ok. I'm just trying to learn about what I can and can't do with Proxmox.) Sidebar: Excellent!!! I will have to review your videos then. Great stuff. Great videos! Thank you! (I'm just getting into Proxmox now and testing it out, so I've been experimenting with a bunch of different things on it.)
Kiosk mode is a setting in the vdiclient config file (kiosk=off should be what you want). The VM doesn't need a desktop environment, the VM's screen image (graphical or VGA terminal) is drawn as an image, then compressed and sent to the client. So the VM sees a (virtual) graphics card, and whatever it draws on that graphics card goes to the client. Most distros will draw a graphical terminal with a nice font and such without a desktop environment, and that works fine with this setup. The client does need a (minimal) desktop environment, since the VDI Client is a graphical app.
i did it, but it still show me "Unable to connect to the graphic server could no to connect to proxy server .... socket io timed out" Can you help me. I tried it all week! But nothing change.
@@apalrdsadventures i did it, but it still show me "Unable to connect to the graphic server could no to connect to proxy server .... socket io timed out" Can you help me. I tried it all week! But nothing change.
Hey it's my project! Great to see someone going over this, and it's neat to see it in action! Looks like I need to figure out why the window isn't centering on Debian...
I have no idea on that one. It never centered when I had LXDE running normally, but suddenly when it was by itself it centered.
Hai can i stream video from the vm via this vdi client ?
@@pokkanvpj As this uses virt-viewer under the hood you shouldn't have any issue with video streaming so long as you set the VM parameters correctly. The VDI client simply provides an easy to use interface for logging into Proxmox to connect to the VM.
Orange pi in my country costs like $8-9. Imagine all the thin client i can make.
Very good project man
Great content! I'll be tuning in to see the progression of this series.
Thanks! Next up is probably pxe booting the whole thing, but I still have plenty of work going on with this
Very good content! I like your angle about VMs and thin clients.
Thanks! I definitely enjoy making useful videos about them
This is a gem, protect him at all costs.
What keyboard/touchpad is that? I've got a ACK-730U that I use a lot from a dead KVM a few years ago.
It's a GearHead Smart Touch II, but it's really quite terrible.
This will help a lot of folks! Great explanation, keep making more and more videos.
I prefer for users just to connect using VNC to their desktop session (each user with own vm). Spice it has its uses, but I find vnc with tigervnc more efficient in general. I use spice or just proxmox console itself just for administration of vms, occasional reboot if they are stuck. So most users do not even have permissions to log to proxmox UI or anything.
I mean, it is not a bad idea. It works, but I do not find it adding a lot.
I still think it would be worthwhile to combine this with an LTSP PXE boot server for the thin-client images, especially now that they could all be identical. LTSP provides a ready-made framework to boot a single image on multiple machines, and also would allow a great degree of administrator oversight/assistance to users through it's remote management. This would free you of the need to even have storage in your thin clients at all.
I agree that PXE is the answer and I'm sure it'll end up in a future episode of this series. I'm still experimenting with LTSP to decide if it's the path I want to go down or not, since I don't really need much of a boot image or NFS-mounted root for a thin client appliance.
@@apalrdsadventures The best way is likely going to be to build a custom debian live environment and pxe boot that.
The trick being that a live environment doesn't expect persistence, but an installed system obviously does.
So if you have more than one client and the boot image isn''t based on a live image or set up with RO root, they will try to get exclusive locks on certain files during boot, and all your clients after the initial one will fail to boot.
I'm expecting that, which is why I don't think LTSP is the answer. Ideally I can compress the whole thing into an initrd to load initially into RAM.
@@apalrdsadventures This is essentially what LTSP with squashfs images served over NBD does. The "master" image is immutable (unless you repack it from the base image or the server itself, depending how you setup your install). Everytime a client boots up, it starts off with a fresh unmodified copy of it, and you can further "personalize" individual clients by the MAC address if you want, there's a lot of options. You can enable SFTP for /home directories, or disable it entirely. Many different ways to go about it. I've used LTSP for both kiosks and classroom computers in the past, and I think I was only scratching the surface of what it could do.
I'm starting to play with it to understand how useful it will be in this case. My next episode on this series will certainly be about netbooting, although I'm currently focused on this and next week's videos. Maybe I'll do it with LTSP and then later without, since plenty of people would find a LTSP-booted client running locally just as useful as a true thin client running a remote session.
Thanks for making this video. I've been thinking about how to do this. My kids play a lot of XP and old windows games. Instead of them fighting over the computer, I have been thinking about setting up VMs for them instead. Then I can also remotely control things, like if the VMs are on or off.
Hi, my name is Raul Junior; I couldn't find his name, very interesting, from what I've seen I can make it run on an old PC with Windows because it was developed in Python... Very cool project! I'm Brazilian, I don't speak English! Congratulations for the video and thanks for sharing your knowledge... I have Proxmox in production and also in the Lab, and I've been looking for something along these lines for some time! As soon as I have some free time I'll test it and post feedback here in the comments!
Thanks for the view from Brazil! Yes, it can run on anything that Python runs on, very handy tool
You do a very good job, and Thanks for the post as well. I built one in my homelab in about 40 minutes total time. Awesome job thank you again. By the way in nano you can use ctrl-w to searh the file for a word.
This is great, I'm going to test some Dell wyse 3040 I've been using for thinclient but with win RDS. Let's see how it's go.
Amazing! This will be SO FREAKING USEFUL! I hope I can put Debian in two old 32 bit atom thin clients I have. The kids love them and think they're cute.
Glad it was helpful!
Just tried this and it works great! Thank you!
Great tutorial but no matter what I do, I always boot into the lxde desktop. I looked at the blog post and it seems that there is a bit of a difference in instructions. I tried both and still keep getting logged into LXDE. Any pointers on what could be the reason?
Hi, everything is very well explained, I was looking for something like that, but my question is if you can virtualize some machines in Windows 10? Does it have any minimum requirements for Windows? Another question is, can you modify where the login is, which when entering the name? username and password enter automatically if you click connect? I remain attentive to your comments, and if possible, could you teach my question how to modify it, best regards
I have followed the instructions but I am getting the following error when I select the VE to launch --- Unable to connect to graphic server - could not connect to proxy server 23.217.138.110: Connection refused. both the Debian client and the PVE server are on the same network. Thank you in advance for any assistance.
What's the best way to take the pre-configured debian installation with VDI Client installed and then convert the whole thin client to a bootable ISO?
Great to see :) I have a question. How do you make this so multiple people can login from thin client in an office environment? Can they access it via a browser internaly?
You can have multiple thin clients if you want, or run the app locally (it runs on Windows and Linux).
@@apalrdsadventures Noticed that on windows its unable to connect to spice server. Works fine with spice directly in proxmox
any Ideas?
Thanks for the video my friend! I am wondering if there is a typo on your post for the raspberry pi. The line "mkdir -p ~/.profile/lxsession/LXDE" should have .config instead of .profile right? :-)
you right. I fixed the post.
seen 2 videos, subbed and likd. go straight no compromises
Should I buy a ThinClient? Great tutorial btw! :)
I have a 9 cluster raspberry pi 5 and 4 proxmox setup now, just seeing the best way I can serve it out as a vdi cluster through a website to allow login sessions to different vdi vm's, am looking at trying to serve out chromiumOS/chromeOS out as a vdi session to zero clients or again through a web site in my house.
Thanks for the great video. Unfortunately, I have the problem that moving the windows is slow as hell. What could be the problem? With the Spice Cleint out of Proxmox it is better but not perfect either.
Has anyone tested this on proxmox 8? I am unable to log into the server "invalid username and PW" with PVE8. It is working fine with proxmox 7.4.
Nice work and nice presentation!
Glad you liked it!
Thanks you for the great work you done for the VDI client , i created 5 VDI clients in a small lab connected to a proxmox cluster , it all works great except for some perfomance issues. (1) when i try to maximize the yuotube screen , the screen on the client freezes and display fragments of the youtube movie. (2) sometimes audio and video on a youtube movie are out of sync. i need to reboot the thin Client to get it right again. Is this anything you have seen before ? Does this need parameters to be tuned ?
OK, i had a few days to have my ways with this program and methods,can we please get an clean rdp promt on linux startup(preferably and iso) so we can only insert user name and password and get served our preconfigured vms through RDP? also thanks a lot for the amazing content, been a reaaaal linux learning experience for me myself
Apalrd,
Ty for nice video. My company has a need to setup Win VMs on a server and login from different hospitals over the internet. Do you do consulting work?
i just got my first wyse3040 for testing and everything worked, thanks a lot for the info!
Glad you liked it!
Great job! Keep going
Thanks!
Hello aparld,thank you for great tutorial,just followed your video and everything working great.Did you try usb redirect with alpine thinclient?I did some change on ini file like enable-usbredir = true,but it wont run.
I have a request: when demoing in a term session, can you please, please increase the font size? At best it is difficult to read and there was one term where it was impossible.
Yup, that's definitely something I can improve in future videos.
Very nice project! Do you think this could also work with openid, authenticating towards azuread?
It forwards auth to Proxmox, so it should work if Proxmox is properly configured at the server side for OpenID
Spice very laggy when i open 3d soft (Blender 3D)
How to Inprove it?
Thanks
Today i saw this problem.
When i open Blender 3D via Spice Remote Desktop. Blender 3D use 100% CPU.
But everything ok if i use VM Directly, dont via Spice protocol
Can we fix it?
Can something similar be done using containers in Docker Swarm so you can achieve zero downtime HA?
Thin clients with high availability would be awesome!
Lik'd and Sub'd for this great content!
Can you tell something about memory consumption? Would be awesome to hsve a decent experience on a pi zero ,2 w
Love Your Videos! I have a bunch of Thin Clients and Zero Clients in need to use for something. What model is that IBM keyboard? I want one!
Definitely not an IBM lol it's a super cheap Amazon keyboard + trackpad I've had for around a decade to use with Pi's.
But I do have a Unicomp IBM replica with buckling spring switches I use for script writing and editing, not in the video.
can we get a version that works from linunx to windows machine please ? i tried everythiong but its sooooo tideous...thanks
can we get a tutorial on deploying this on a office enviroment please for windows users ? thanks a lot
What is the best spice client for MacOS. The original Spice viewer is horrible. I only use Linux and MacOS.
Second!🥈
You'll have to be faster next time
Very nice video, thank you - is running a vdiclient like this viable for basic users that want internet/youtube/basic office functionality?
vdiclient can certainly do office work and internet. Full screen video sometimes looks bad due to being rendered on the server and then compressed again to send over the network.
This is really helpfull .
very interesting , can you make the same video for windows 10 vdi ?
Any OS that Proxmox can virtualize be used this way, so you'd just need to setup Windows 10 there instead of Ubuntu. I don't usually do this since my Proxmox server doesn't have enough RAM for another Windows VM with everything I'm already running. But it absolutely works with Windows 10 on the VM side.
On the client side it's an appliance so the OS doesn't really matter, you shouldn't be interacting with the client's underlying OS (at least as a thin client). But the Python tool does run on Windows and there are install instructions along with it on Github.
What Keyboard/Mouse combo Is that?
What's the *thinnest* client that can (slowly) run a client (vnc or spice or whatever) ?
Show us parsec dude we need to see gaming on one
Great... much better like RAsb. OS. Lite. Thanks
I stuck with Desktop since it makes audio easier in this case, but eventually we're going back to a bare bare minimum setup when I bring PXE into the mix.
@@apalrdsadventures Thats right. For some audio ist not working even some settings. PXE ? I have PXE on my server. I am interessted in this. Will be nice.
Raspberry Pi defaults to audio on the analog port instead of HDMI. If you change the audio settings on Desktop before you delete the desktop configuration, those settings should persist and all should work.
PXE is currently in progress on my end, so not coming out in the next week or two, but it's a key goal for my overall thin client project
already tried guacamole?
Hi , what about graphic intensive application? Spice could support a user experience like a normal pc? I’m asking this because we could have 10 users to transition to vdi but other solution are complex and very high price. What about also a network bandwidth consumption on lan and over internet for 1 user? Thanks
It depends. SPICE's video compression is generally good for things that aren't heavily moving (it prioritizes quality / fine detail like fonts over framerate).
Bandwidth isn't bad, but it's quite latency sensitive, so over the internet won't be a perfect experience.
Should we need to install anything on VM host?
My both VM and Client use too much CPU.
Thanks!
No, Proxmox should be installed normally in this case.
@@apalrdsadventures And should i need to install anything on VM?
Thanks!
I have diskless Axel M80 thin clients that I would like to hook up. Would it be possible to configure the imbedded Citrix VDI in a Box authorisation screens to match the Proxmox server-side requirements?
The SPICE protocol used by kvm / Proxmox doesn't appear to be supported there. You can use VNC, although support in Proxmox is lower than SPICE (it's not available via the API, you have to add it to VM configs manually, and there is no TLS proxy / Proxmox-based authentication)
I tried to install VDI-Client using Debian11 Buleseye and couldn't connect to the server, but I managed to connect according to your Raspberry Pi tutorial, so I think it's an OS problem.
Does it run on its own with the Debian desktop still installed? What errors do you get?
Thank you for your reply, now there is such an error：“Unable to connect to the graphic server - ” SPICE proxy:Error resolving "PVE01-TEST.local":Name or service not known
PVE returns the DNS name of itself as the SPICE server, so if your network doesn't resolve PVE's DNS name you have to add an entry in the client config file section [SpiceProxyRedirect] to rewrite the name PVE returns into something else (like its IP address).
github.com/joshpatten/PVE-VDIClient/blob/main/vdiclient.ini.example
@@apalrdsadventures Thanks for the help, successfully solved.
@@apalrdsadventures Hi, I'm following your tutorials on thin clients using the raspberry very carefully. I have the same problem mentioned by dh s. below my vdiclient.ini file
[General]
title = apalrd VDI
icon=vdiicon.ico
logo=vdilogo.png
kiosk=false
[Authentication]
auth_backend=pve
auth_totp=false
tls_verify=false
[Hosts]
192.168.1.22 = 8006
pve.pino.local = 8006
[SpiceProxyRedirect]
pve.pino.local:3128 = 192.168.1.250:6000
iAt the moment I try to connect with the virtual machine, a window opens with the following error:
Unable to connect to prozy server 123.123.123.123:I/O on socket expired.
Returning to my vdiclient ini file in the [SpiceProxyRedirect] section what am I wrong?
what IP address should I put to redirect host?
Thanks anyway for your tutorials and I hope you answer me
Pino Patanè
what is the dell your using? I love how small it is
Its a Dell Wyse 3040
Thank you so much for sharing. Now there is a problem. Playing video is very dependent on the performance of the thin client. Can it be optimized? Looking forward to your reply!
You can try enabling video streaming mode on the Proxmox side (it's in the VM configuration, under Options -> SPICE Enhancements). This will make it use a JPEG-like algorithm when there is a lot of movement vs the normal PNG-like lossless algorithm. However, SPICE is ultimately going to drop frames to maintain quality (non-video mode) or drop quality to maintain frames (video mode), so quality will suffer a lot playing video in video mode.
@@apalrdsadventures Thank you for your reply! I tried SPICE Enhancements. When enabled, the video playback screen will tear. Can GStreamer algorithms be used on Proxmox? Have you tried it?
@@apalrdsadventures In addition, with your plan, the client's network speed seems to be limited to 30M. Can it be increased?
SPICE only supports those the three modes (off/all/filter), which either uses the lossless compression, lossy compression, or switches dynamically based on motion. In general it's just not a great protocol for video streaming, though, since it's focused on high image quality.
As to the network speed, that's not directly limited by either Proxmox or the client.
@@apalrdsadventures When monitoring the thin client traffic, I found that the maximum traffic is 30M. Could this be the reason for the screen tearing? I use the SPICE client to connect under windows, and the traffic will reach 400M (at 1080P resolution).
How can I disconnect when using Kiosk mode?
Can multiple users connect to the same VM at the same time, each in his own session?
There's only one emulated display, so no. Multiple users per VM aren't supported by SPICE.
@@apalrdsadventures Are there other options different from xrdp though? I've tried xrdp for a terminal server, but it's quite buggy.
Cool brother its cool.
I will give it a try
as my home lab crashed due to some testing i have to rebuild all
Really apprentice your effort
Thanks
Thanks, and good luck!
Given that proxmox 8.1.4 has already active directory integration (LDAP realm is configured) can PVE-VDIClient support that LDAP Realm ? Can I simply set the auth_backend=ldap ?
It should work, but I don't work with Windows so I can't test it
@@apalrdsadventures Much obliged! I'll test it next week and i will report back. Keep up the good work! Your videos are the best in the field !
How could I make it authenticate with an active directory that I have in Windows?
You can setup AD Auth in Proxmox, it would be the 'ldap' backend in the vdi client configuration file.
Is it possible to use a Windows vm with gpu paasthrough and get a reliable game experience?
Probably not via Spice. Too much Latency. You could use Parsec. They where bought up tho and it really bugs me, that they have now a premium option too, which means the free tier is limited to 4:2:0 colorspace and some other small limitations. Doesnt really matter for Gaming, but you can see the difference in pretty Games like RDR2 or similar.
Might want to check out Craft Computing's episode on a gaming server with proxmox or some such title. Might be what you are seeking.
SPICE normally does lossless regional compression which works terribly for games, but in video compression mode it's a bit better for framerate. Another issue you'll have is that SPICE is emulating a VGA card, so the VM will have an emulated low end VGA card + passed-through high end GPU and sometimes it doesn't like drawing with 3D acceleration on the unaccelerated card.
Can this still be done using Debian12 & Proxmox 8.02?
Definitely!
Thanks. Great Video. Is there an option to shutdown the thin Client Hardware from VDI login prompt?
No.
The next step for me is setting up the OS to run from RAM / read only FS so you can certainly just pull the plug.
I would suggest adding an issue on the github page so that I can add it as a feature.
God bless you
Awesome
Thanks!
Hi, thaks for share your knolege, you have a very good tutorials about Proxmox
Now, I have a question
how make windows have the maximum resolution for my monitor, only have this when I access to the VM via RDP from my Windows 10, but when I use SPICE only one time had the maximum resolution after restart the VM windows only have 1024x728 in the resolution.
I ran SPICE from my Debian ...
Thanks in advance for your support
You probably need to install the SPICE guest drivers (www.spice-space.org/download/windows/spice-guest-tools/spice-guest-tools-latest.exe), otherwise Windows will be in VGA compatibility mode.
@@apalrdsadventures Thaks
need some help here
i login successfully but i cant connect to my vm's its telling could not connect to proxy server socket I/O timed out
i got this error too. have you fix it?
Hello! I have a Win10 in Proxmox with multiple user accounts. Is there a method to login with a user to his/her corresponding account on that Win10 VM?
Not really, since SPICE just emulates the graphics / IO and doesn't interact with the OS directly.
@@apalrdsadventures Thanks. Then I stick to RDP, I guess.
I can use windows 10 vdi client as your video setup this guide ?
The client runs on Windows too, you should just need to install python3 and pip, and use the Windows-specific file paths.
I miss something in the guide, how do you make this into a image that the netboot server starts?
The video with the netboot image is here - ua-cam.com/video/r-TnP06K-gE/v-deo.html
This video is earlier in the series
@@apalrdsadventures missed that one, thnx!
Does the desktop environment matter? I keep getting an "cannot connect to graphic server" error after attempting to connect to one of my VMs.
Also absolutely love your thin client experiments, they've been extremely helpful.
On the VM, no, it shouldn't matter.
Does it work if you use remote-viewer manually (clicking the SPICE button in the Proxmox web UI on your workstation)? It's also possible you need a proxy entry in the vdiclient config, since by default the Proxmox server returns its own FQDN instead of IP address, and if your network can't resolve that name then it won't connect.
@Husky IT I got mine to work tonight using the comments from "dh s" in this comment section. Look in the example ini file for the spice proxy settings. I had to add my proxmox server IP address with the 3128 port equalling whatever the spice proxy was trying to connect with (something like NODE_NAME:3128). Hopefully the comments below help.
thank you
Glad you like it!
Is there existing the same solution but for windows desktop?
The VMs on Proxmox can run Windows, so the thin client can access any VMs which Proxmox can run.
The Python client also runs on Windows natively (there's a bit of a guide on the Github page), if you want to use it on your workstation.
Hi, i follower your tutorial and everything works but when I try to connect to the vm I get unable to connect to the graphical server error. Does annone know how to solve it? Please, I really need it. thanks in advice
That error means remote viewer can’t resolve the domain name returned by Proxmox. The client probably needs it added to its hosts file or DNS.
unable to locate promoxer package on Debian 12 net install, how dont know how to add the package as i dont have the source list
can you help Apalrd?
It's part of pip (python packages), not apt. It should work if python3-pip is installed.
@@apalrdsadventures sorted apologies newbie mistake. Environment variables not set
@@apalrdsadventures vdiclient directory not on the /usr/local/bin directory
@@apalrdsadventures decided to cancel the project. Could not get the login gui on the machine. Kept on booting into normal Debian OS login page
Can you log into multiple VMs in parallel?
Thanks
Yes! It'll open the client fullscreen, but you can hover at the top center to bring the menu down and make it un-fullscreen and from there the VM list is still open in the background.
Have you thought about exploring LXD by any chance?
On Proxmox? Proxmox uses LXC, but manages it with its UI. You don't get a display device with LXC though, unless you setup an X server with RDP or VNC.
@@apalrdsadventures No, I meant LXD. I love Proxmox, but for me the main problem with it is that it's locked into using Debian for the host OS, whereas the snap version of LXD can run on just about any distro or OS and provides more or less the same functionality as Proxmox, minus a GUI.
So what's the advantage when using Proxmox as a hypervisor? The backend distro doesn't matter, you can install any distro in the container
@@apalrdsadventures Sure, but I can't run a VM/CT cluster on anything but Debian hosts. Right now I have a LXD cluster running on my Manjaro laptop, a Ubuntu desktop miniPC and the third node on a Proxmox managed Ubuntu VM. I think it's also possible to run a snap based LXD on Windows and Mac too... and Alpine, or a PI running any OS that supports snapd.
good job
Man I just built a server. I am running TrueNAS scale (for now). I really need to figure this out for TrueNAS so I can use a fe wPi thin clients and reclaim some hardware from around the house.
In theory you should be able to setup the QXL backend for kvm, but TrueNAS doesn't have the same SPICE proxy / authentication setup that Proxmox does so you wont be able to use exactly the same script. The TrueNAS guys are also really irritatingly bent on not allowing absolutely any changes to the host system (they disabled apt in the final SCALE release because they don't want anyone touching their perfect system), whereas Proxmox is much more open about it being a Debian system and using Debian management tools is perfectly normal.
@@apalrdsadventures darn. So my home lab has 1 system. 6c/12t cpu, 32gb ram, 5x 4TB HDDs and 1x 120gb SSD for os.
My wants/needs, run some VMs, some containers (kube?) and most importantly a NAS. I am not sold on a solution yet. Suggestions?
I use Proxmox and TrueNAS on different hardware. At this point, if I had a single system, I would use Proxmox and either manage Samba through the command line or install an additional web GUI on the Proxmox host to manage it. But I also feel confident in manually managing Samba without a GUI since I did it before TrueNAS for a few years.
Proxmox does LXC containers instead of Docker/Kubernetes, which are more similar to mini-VMs. They have their own IP addresses and root filesystems and you can login to them normally and use them like a normal console operating system. I prefer these over Docker for my use cases, I'm not a docker fan at all really.
But they (Proxmox) also aren't dicks about you using the host for things the host wasn't designed for (such as running Samba on the host OS) as long as you don't complain about it not working right on the forums (TrueNAS removed apt so you can't use it for anything else in the host OS). They fully support ZFS, and also allow you to install the OS on data drives (make sure you select ZFS in the installer! If you have a single disk select 'raid0')
You could install Proxmox using ZFS on the 120G drive (and still use the free space for VMs/CTs!) and import the existing pool from TrueNAS as a second pool. You'll probably have to reset file permissions since the same users won't exist in the new system.
A final option you have is to install an LXC container for file sharing, using bind mounts of the zfs datasets you want to share, and use one of the tutorials other people have shared to use Alpine Linux or something like that, so you get a bit more guidance than yoloing a smb.conf on the Proxmox host.
Hello Mr thank you for vidéo
I need VDI os for make VDI client of.windows Can use proxmox ?? How Can download os VDI and install.in client machine
how is client performance?
Perfectly fine for 'office' type normal computer work. Not good for gaming, adequate for watching videos and such.
Nice....I'll make a lab of PROXMOX
Proxmox is a great piece of software!
Why can't we attach a virtual video hardware to an lxc in proxmox?
To an LXC? There's usually no reason to, you can use something like xrdp or xvnc to get video out of the container.
@@apalrdsadventures spice would be nice as well. Just a thought.
Sadly my present connection has proxmox behind a nat gateway I don't have control of. So I have limited access to its exposed ports.
Basically LXC is a process namespace and not a fully emulated machine, so you can either attach physical hardware to it or run purely software solution on your own in the container. There is no hardware emulation daemon for containers like qemu for VMs.
Wonderful video and everything's working as expected..
Except the last part unfortunately, i don't know why. But only the autologin is working.
When i reboot, i still have the LXDE desktop and the script to start the vdiclient is not working.
Any idea why ? Thanks you !
PS : I'm on Debian 11
If you have a user autostart file in the right place, it should run that. Verify the paths (they are different for Pi vs regular Debian), it should be ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart and it should be empty other than the one line to call the thin client script. The system autostart should also be emptied (/etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart).
If you get to a point where the LXDE desktop is gone but the vdiclient isn't starting, you can right click and open a terminal and then try to run the script manually
@@apalrdsadventures Thanks answering, yes like you said in ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart there is only the line we added.
And autostart in /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/ it's empty too.
Even the LXDE desktop boot normally, it's almost like nothing i did worked for the last part..
I will try on other distribution in case it's working.
Well that's curious. Are you actually running LXDE? Try opening a console from the desktop and running 'killall lxsession' and see if it logs you out. If it doesn't, it's not an LXDE session and that's the issue.
Lubuntu switched from LXDE to LXQT, so the same autostart trick won't work there.
@@apalrdsadventures
So that's very strange...
It log me out when i did your command and login back not with my normal user account but with the root, everything worked perfectly...
Then i did again a killall lxsession et try to log this time with the non root account and nothing was working.
The user is in sudoers so it's not a right issue i think...
Try with a fresh Debian install? Make sure you select only LXDE as the desktop environment (deselect GNOME) in the installer. It sounds like you may have multiple desktops installed, which is not unusual on a Linux system.
Unable to connect to the graphic server
Could no connect proxy server xxxxxx:socket i/o timed out
I dont know why it always show my like that.
helpme! plz!
This means that the client cannot access the server at the address listed in that message. So either the Proxmox server returned a DNS name and the client can't resolve it, or the client is being blocked by a firewall somehow.
You can add the Proxmox server's address to /etc/hosts, add it to your DNS server, or edit the vdiclient ini file to map the old address to the IP.
@@apalrdsadventures
My ip dress to open Proxmox in web browser Is: 192.168.1.100:8006
In my vdiclient.ini:
[hosts]
192.168.1.100=8006
Did I do something wrong?
Thank you!
@@apalrdsadventures For clearly i type here:
GNU nano 7.2. /etc/hosts *:
127.0.0.1 localhost. localdomain localhost
192.168.1.100 aatee01. education.branch2 hatde01
------------------------
vdiclient.ini:
[General]
title = apalrd VDI
icon=vdiicon.1co
Logo=vd1 logo.png
kiosk=false
[Authentication]
auth_backend=pve
auth_totp=false
t ls_verify=false
[Hosts)
192.168.1.100 =8006
Plz tell me if i have any problem
The graphic server will use what Proxmox believes its domain name to be, which is not an IP address. The error message will tell you the address it's trying to use and it's trying to resolve it via DNS.
The [hosts] directive in the ini is what IP to use to connect to the API, but the API returns the graphic sever config file so it doesn't use the same IP you used to connect.
@@apalrdsadventures Thanks for you help!
Currently my lines of code are like this, Where should the IP from the error message be filled in here?
GNU nano 7.2. /etc/hosts *:
127.0.0.1 localhost. localdomain localhost
192.168.1.100 aatee01. education.branch2 hatde01
------------------------
vdiclient.ini:
[Hosts)
192.168.1.100 =8006
Anyone managed to pass through a USB device from a Windows 10 client to a Linux VM? My spice client on Windows crashes the second I try to redirect a usb device. 😕 I installed the remote viewer and the spice usb drivers on my Win10
It's a known bug gitlab.com/virt-viewer/virt-viewer/-/issues/61
You install version 10 (latest is 11), then copy libusb.dll from the older version to the newer one.
Hi, thanks for the videos, also i have this error, I can't connect to the VM:
Could not connect to the graphical server.
SPICE proxy: Error resolving pve.local: Unknown name or service
Thanks for help.
the Proxmox server thinks it's DNS name is pve.local and that can't be resolved by the client
.local is reserved for mdns, so you either need to change the name to something which the client can resolve or add a [SpiceProxyRedirect] rule on the client
@@apalrdsadventures [SpiceProxyRedirect]
pve.local:3128 = 192.168.1.11:3128
I have put it like this but it doesn't work...
does it only work for linux as a client?
It supports any virtual machine that Proxmox does, although there are only QXL guest drivers available for Linux and Windows. Other OSes work in VGA emulation.
@@apalrdsadventures Thanks for the response but i'm asking the client. I couldn't find client software for windows.
It does work on Windows, but there is no macos version.
www.spice-space.org/download.html has the info you need (you just need virt-viewer unless you want to do USB redirection)
Thanks to you and @joshpatten
Couldn’t you just use guacamole?
This doesn't require any software to be installed on the VM, so it works with any OS. It also supports arbitrary USB redirection, which no other remote access protocol has.
now boot into the pie via PXE and power it via POE. 😂
you have 1 sub more
Hi i seen to ve having an error when i tried to install the pip3 line that had proxmoxer and pysimpleguiqt, i get a message saying that error: externally managed environment,
This is on Debian 12, also had a not about using yhe break sustem packages override, os thsre a way ro fix this by any chance.
+1
your spelling is way off
Create video
For anyone that wants to go back to autostart config from RPi, and might have deleted the default config:
Under the folder: cd /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi
nano autostart
@lxpanel --profile LXDE-pi
@pcmanfm --desktop --profile LXDE-pi
@xscreensaver -no-splash
Three questions:
1) Can you launch multiple VMs simultaneously?
2) Do you HAVE to install a desktop environment for this to work? (i.e. if I do a "base" Debian install without a desktop environment, will this still work?)
3) Is the performance of this solution fast enough that I would be able to game with this? Or will that depend on the processing capability of my thin client? (i.e. will the video be drawn on the passed through GPU or will it be drawn/rendered on the thin client?)
(sidebar: In watching this video, what I am thinking of doing is actually having my thin clients boot remotely, over PXE into this. So I will set up a VM in Proxmox that will be the PXE boot server that will serve up the thin client OS image, that will then take it straight into this login/VDI menu.
If it works as shown, in theory, either I can have multiple users logging into my Proxmox server simultaneously, to be able to get access to the other VMs OR, what would be even better is that the same user can log in multiple times, and be able to call up different VMs via different thin clients.)
1. You can connect to multiple VMs simultaneously as a single user, and if you use fullscreen mode instead of kiosk mode, you can do multiple sessions on the same thin client (but they will open full screen, so you'd need to un-fullscreen them). Only one session can be open to each VM at a time, regardless of users.
2. No, you don't need a desktop environment, but you do need a SPICE graphics adapter on the VM, so no serial terminals. Without a desktop it will draw a text terminal graphically.
3. Gaming is ... not ideal. The compression algorithms used by SPICE really prioritize quality over framerate, using something similar to PNG compression. You can switch to video-mode, which uses a lossy compression similar to JPEG and then eventually switches back when activity drops, but visual quality is quite bad as it tries to handle higher framerates. It's fairly comparable to RDP without any client-side rendering.
sidebar: I have a pair of videos on exactly this setup, one setting up a PXE server and one setting up the client template
There's no limit to how many times a single account can log in to the server, only a limit of 1 client per VM at a time.
@@apalrdsadventures
1. Thank you. I'll have to research how to open a VM in kiosk mode rather than full screen mode.
2. "Without a desktop it will draw a text terminal graphically."
So...in the video/example that you showed here - it was able to pull up the Ubuntu desktop, but that was also because you were logging in via the Debian LXDE desktop environment. If I *didn't* install any desktop environment, will I still be able to see the Ubuntu Desktop or no?
3. If I want to game on a Proxmox server which is hosting the gaming VM, what would be the better way for me to connect to said gaming VM them? (if that is a really dumb idea -- that's ok. I'm just trying to learn about what I can and can't do with Proxmox.)
Sidebar: Excellent!!! I will have to review your videos then.
Great stuff. Great videos!
Thank you!
(I'm just getting into Proxmox now and testing it out, so I've been experimenting with a bunch of different things on it.)
Kiosk mode is a setting in the vdiclient config file (kiosk=off should be what you want).
The VM doesn't need a desktop environment, the VM's screen image (graphical or VGA terminal) is drawn as an image, then compressed and sent to the client. So the VM sees a (virtual) graphics card, and whatever it draws on that graphics card goes to the client. Most distros will draw a graphical terminal with a nice font and such without a desktop environment, and that works fine with this setup.
The client does need a (minimal) desktop environment, since the VDI Client is a graphical app.
@@apalrdsadventures
Ahhh....okay.
I might have to experiment with that tonight then, to see if I can get that going.
Thank you.
gooood !! work as it should ! don't forget =
[SpiceProxyRedirect]
{your proxmox's host name}:3128 = {your proxmox's ip adress}:3128
Only if your network can't resolve the Proxmox server's fqdn locally
i did it, but it still show me "Unable to connect to the graphic server
could no to connect to proxy server .... socket io timed out"
Can you help me. I tried it all week! But nothing change.
@@apalrdsadventures i did it, but it still show me "Unable to connect to the graphic server
could no to connect to proxy server .... socket io timed out"
Can you help me. I tried it all week! But nothing change.