Wow..!!! Very impressive tutorial. I hope you stay in the groove here doing these as you are a "Natural" at this. I've seen my share of tutorials that are either to much talking and dragging it others that are way too far to understand, but yours are right in the pocket. I've been wanting to setup a VM server, but it seemed eat complicated, but after watching your excellent tutorial I'm inspired. That said I seriously need to play with this Proxmox and get comfortable with it. Keep up the good work man. !!! 👍😊
@@apalrdsadventures I have a server with Proxmox myself so anything Proxmox related is always good but this is a really cool concept that I haven't seen anyone else do before! So for me Proxmox in general, but I have a couple spare pi's lying around so I'm definitely trying this out!
Great to hear! I'm working on a series of Proxmox clustering / Ceph videos right now, but I'm thinking of other projects for the pi thin client as well!
I have been trying to do stuff like this since 2020 (got stuck in the house bored and started messing with Proxmox at the time) and never could get anything like this to work for me. I am really excited to see this kind of stuff and honestly, I think this has sparked some ideas in my head for single application thin clients. You log into the Thin Client and it opens up the virtual machine, but the virtual machines has nothing running on it GUI wise besides a single application, solitare as an example. So you could open up a virtual machine that is dedicated to Solitare
I'll give that a like, useful information here. I've got a bunch of PXE-booted Debian kiosks at my workplace we use for our security camera monitors and various dashboard displays, and I need to go around and individually mess with them whenever we want to change the view (they all mostly show the same thing) or reboot them after reconfiguring the master images. I've done quite some experiments and practical usage of linux-based kiosks using PXE network booting (LTSP and FOG) at work, but not much with VDI yet... I think combining the two is where the real game-changer will be, a PXE-booted thin client for VDI desktops that display dashboards or video streams. I'm not too worried about the latency or framerate in these applications, the dashboards update at most once a minute and video is only 15 FPS. Getting even more meta, the virtual desktops themselves could be LTSP or FOG images PXE-booted directly off our iSCSI storage...
I've played with PXE separately (before I was making videos for TH-cam), so PXE is definitely a topic I'll explore eventually. I haven't used LTSP, but I'm currently working on a video using xrdp for sorta-similar purposes (mostly because Microsoft's RDP client is available for pretty much all of the laptop / tablet / TV OSes in use today). In your specific case, VDI might not be the answer, maybe just something to check if the configuration has changed and restart the session (or reboot the machine).
Cool stuff, thanks for sharing this. Would it be possible to do this using AD users and groups instead of local users? I assume so but I don't know how much work this would involve. Would be a cool cheap way to get something equivalent to a commercial vdi solution 👍👌
You could either do authentication at the VM level (user logs in on the thin client with no password to a VM, VM requires login), which would mean 1:1 relationship between thin clients and VMs, or do authentication at the thin client, query LDAP/AD for the user's home VM ID, and have a 1:1 relationship between users and VMs (with the VM either requiring login again or setup for auto-login to its specific user). If you're operating at a large scale and are either all Windows or all Linux, using their respective terminal services (RDP + Windows Server terminal services or X forwarding) would be more efficient server side than having a lot of VMs. But if you are mixing OSes, or need to be running in VMs for other reasons, then this method works well.
Excellent follow-up video. This touches almost exactly on what I asked about in your last Pi Thin Client vid. I imagine this can be done with other flavors of Linux as well with similar results. Since Pi's are in short supply, I have been looking at the Wyse Thin Client like you had on your desk at the start of the video for setting my my environment.
I have Debian instructions in the blog post, and that should run on most other things. Since I'm relying on lxsession's specific autostart, it doesn't translate well to non-LXDE environments, but Debian offers LXDE as an option during install. There's a Linux mostly universal way to autostart programs for a user, but removing the existing desktop environment bits is easier with LXDE.
@@apalrdsadventures Started messing around with this over the weekend, and so far I can't seem to get it working. Followed all your instructions, made sure to change the node name in the thinclient script to my dns name and then added the ip to the node proxy, but I get an issue with connecting to the spiceproxy (in Debian). After watching your video several times, i thought this would be a breeze. And this is just for an Ubuntu VM, haven't attempted the Windows 10 VM yet.
@@richardmccreery Can you try running the script in a terminal to see if there are any CURL errors? Or does remote-viewer launch and never connect (it'll say something like 'connecting to graphics session') Also, node name needs to exactly match the 'node' named in Proxmox. The script will strip everything after the first . (so if your Proxmox node named 'pve' has the DNS name 'pve.mydomain.net' it would correctly strip it) but if your node name in Proxmox doesn't match the DNS name it won't work. Using the DNS name is mostly a shortcut (since PROXY = NODE by default, you can type only the DNS name and it'll get both the IP via DNS and the Proxmox node name), but really what it needs is the address and Proxmox node name.
@@apalrdsadventures not sure how to run the curl script in terminal. when I select which user (VM), once I click login the screen goes blank (except for the background image) and nothing ever happens. I did make sure they both open using the spice console selection from proxmox, everything is good to that point so I know remote-viewer is working. My node name is pve2 so that is the only thing I need to modify in the thinclient script, assuming I haven't missed something between watching the video and following the blogpost. Being able to run from a thin client seems to be the only sticking point, oh and I started over using the raspberry pi os.
@@richardmccreery Once the desktop background comes up you should be able to right-click and select 'Open Terminal', then you can manually type '/usr/local/bin/thinclient 100' (or your VM ID)
If I have a Hp thinclient can I use rasbian OS on there and do the same thing? I have a couple of thes 2 cores 2 threads thin clients but never really had use for them to do anything but to use as a remote thin client.
Remember that the VM believes it's connected to a physical monitor/keyboard/mouse and will probably require login of its own, so you could do user management there instead of at the thin client. It really depends on how you want to deploy it (VM per user or VM per thin client)
I tried to do the sam on my banana pi m2 berry with raspbian installed and it doesn't work, it stucks after i try to login into the vm, does anyone know if it works on banana pi too and how to make it work? Thanks in advance
This is exactly what I’ve been needing to see. For the past 6-12 months I’ve wondered how to do this with my proxmox VMs. Thanks for the guides. Curious how long it took for the spice client to show up though. Mine is taking quiet a while. In fact, the VM desktop hasn’t showed up yet. Not sure if I have the confit wrong or it’s a resource issue. What are some ways I can go about troubleshooting this issue?
It's usually fairly quick, a few seconds once the spice client opens. If it doesn't open, you can debug it (right-click on the blank desktop and run a terminal, then run the thinclient.sh manually to see the output). Once the spice client connects, sometimes the VM has blanked the display (to 'power save' the monitor), and you have to move the mouse to get the VM to wake up. I also have another video using the Proxmox VDI Client tool that a viewer wrote - that one doesn't require the thinclient.sh or any of that manual configuration.
@@apalrdsadventures initially it was user error - password had an incorrect character :) oops Now I’m getting a permission denied error for the spiceproxy config file. What should be the permissions for that file? It says my local user owns the file.
Hey guys, Nice extension of the previous "Raspberry Pi THIN CLIENT for Proxmox VMs", tutorial. However what has to be done on the Promox VM Side. I saw that Spice has to be Selected for both Display and USB but inside the VM what has to be done?
For Linux VMs, nothing has to be done. For Windows VMs, you either need to install the SPICE guest tools (spice-space.org) or disable 'tablet as pointer' in the VM options page. Windows will work with the graphics in VGA compatibility until you do this, but the mouse won't work without the tablet driver.
macOS client (running as a thin client) or guest in Proxmox? For the guest, as long as you can get macOS to run in Proxmox you can use this as a thin client for it. For a client, you can get remote-viewer from Homebrew and the shell script should run, but beyond that its unlikely to work.
In my experience, not necessarily, since the SPICE (QXL) graphics is emulating a graphics card. The VM will have a non-accelerated QXL card in addition to the pass-through GPU. So you'd need the game to 'run' on the GPU's graphics output and mirror it to the SPICE output. The last time I tested this I didn't have any HDMI headless dongles, so I couldn't mirror graphics across QXL and GPU. I might get back to this someday.
LearnLinuxTV has a pretty thorough course on the core concepts of Proxmox - th-cam.com/play/PLT98CRl2KxKHnlbYhtABg6cF50bYa8Ulo.html It's a bit lengthy, but he goes into a lot of detail on both containers and VMs on Proxmox.
Almost always that means either the Proxmox server information is incorrect (node name / proxy IP address or DNS name), or the Proxmox user account is invalid or doesn't have permissions to access the VM. You can right-click on the background, open a terminal, and run the shell script manually to see errors from it.
@@apalrdsadventures actually i tried install the entire procedure in an alredy running pi Today i managed to install and set up in a brand new set up I tried running the script and my user say vdiubuntu throws an error saying line 49 thats the curl..... Doesn't have permission. Can you help The kiosk mode works like a charm
@@ajiahamed That would mean your username / password doesn't have permissions in Proxmox to access the console. Check that the realm is right (username = @pve), password and user are typed correctly, and permissions are right in Proxmox
@@apalrdsadventures i am getting this error AUTH OK ./thinclient: line 49: spiceproxy: Permission denied While exicuting as the vdiubuntu user in my pi I checked as you said all are fine but when i log inn its says connecting to server and blank and then log out automaticaly
It sounds like a file access issue and not a curl or remote-viewer issue. You're running as user vdiubuntu from their home directory, correct? so spiceproxy should be a file in their home directory owned by vdiubuntu? Can you check and see if the file already exists and remove it? Another possibility is that the user is correct but permissions are wrong in Proxmox - the first curl gets the user's auth token which verifies that the username/password is valid, the second curl requests the spiceproxy file and if the user was valid but didn't have permissions for that VM it would fail at the second curl.
old version of the scrip works for me , i wanted to test this new version and im getting an error msg " unable to connect to the graphic server spiceproxy --spice proxy:error resolving "mylab.local":name of service not known . in my node host file i have 192.168.2.5 mylab.local mylab so i think that thas where is getting mylab.local because i never added that info to the script i also want to ad that i dont have dns on my proxmox web interface i access with the ip
Wow..!!! Very impressive tutorial.
I hope you stay in the groove here doing these as you are a "Natural" at this. I've seen my share of tutorials that are either to much talking and dragging it others that are way too far to understand, but yours are right in the pocket.
I've been wanting to setup a VM server, but it seemed eat complicated, but after watching your excellent tutorial I'm inspired. That said I seriously need to play with this Proxmox and get comfortable with it.
Keep up the good work man. !!! 👍😊
Thanks! I'm working on a few other videos more Proxmox focused than this one
This is so cool! And as others have said you are really good at it! Thanks a lot! Hope you keep up these Proxmox guides :D
Do you prefer Proxmox in general or the Pi / VDI guides specifically?
@@apalrdsadventures I have a server with Proxmox myself so anything Proxmox related is always good but this is a really cool concept that I haven't seen anyone else do before!
So for me Proxmox in general, but I have a couple spare pi's lying around so I'm definitely trying this out!
Great to hear! I'm working on a series of Proxmox clustering / Ceph videos right now, but I'm thinking of other projects for the pi thin client as well!
I have been trying to do stuff like this since 2020 (got stuck in the house bored and started messing with Proxmox at the time) and never could get anything like this to work for me. I am really excited to see this kind of stuff and honestly, I think this has sparked some ideas in my head for single application thin clients.
You log into the Thin Client and it opens up the virtual machine, but the virtual machines has nothing running on it GUI wise besides a single application, solitare as an example.
So you could open up a virtual machine that is dedicated to Solitare
You can do restricted apps the same way as the thin client, where the autostart file launches the app.
I'll give that a like, useful information here. I've got a bunch of PXE-booted Debian kiosks at my workplace we use for our security camera monitors and various dashboard displays, and I need to go around and individually mess with them whenever we want to change the view (they all mostly show the same thing) or reboot them after reconfiguring the master images. I've done quite some experiments and practical usage of linux-based kiosks using PXE network booting (LTSP and FOG) at work, but not much with VDI yet... I think combining the two is where the real game-changer will be, a PXE-booted thin client for VDI desktops that display dashboards or video streams. I'm not too worried about the latency or framerate in these applications, the dashboards update at most once a minute and video is only 15 FPS. Getting even more meta, the virtual desktops themselves could be LTSP or FOG images PXE-booted directly off our iSCSI storage...
I've played with PXE separately (before I was making videos for TH-cam), so PXE is definitely a topic I'll explore eventually.
I haven't used LTSP, but I'm currently working on a video using xrdp for sorta-similar purposes (mostly because Microsoft's RDP client is available for pretty much all of the laptop / tablet / TV OSes in use today).
In your specific case, VDI might not be the answer, maybe just something to check if the configuration has changed and restart the session (or reboot the machine).
Great tutorial, and some great content posted so far, worth a subscribe.
But you really need to invest in a better microphone and web camera.
I have both a new camera and a new mic on order, but they won't be featured in the next few videos unfortunately.
@@apalrdsadventures Awesome, Production quality increases should help with channel growth. Looking forward to more videos. 👍
Very cool thing to do with the Raspberry Pi or any other Debian / Ubuntu base setup.
Thanks! It's certainly useful if you do a lot with virtualized desktops
Cool stuff, thanks for sharing this. Would it be possible to do this using AD users and groups instead of local users? I assume so but I don't know how much work this would involve. Would be a cool cheap way to get something equivalent to a commercial vdi solution 👍👌
You could either do authentication at the VM level (user logs in on the thin client with no password to a VM, VM requires login), which would mean 1:1 relationship between thin clients and VMs, or do authentication at the thin client, query LDAP/AD for the user's home VM ID, and have a 1:1 relationship between users and VMs (with the VM either requiring login again or setup for auto-login to its specific user).
If you're operating at a large scale and are either all Windows or all Linux, using their respective terminal services (RDP + Windows Server terminal services or X forwarding) would be more efficient server side than having a lot of VMs. But if you are mixing OSes, or need to be running in VMs for other reasons, then this method works well.
Nice bud! next project I'm gonna take up
Go for it!
Excellent follow-up video. This touches almost exactly on what I asked about in your last Pi Thin Client vid. I imagine this can be done with other flavors of Linux as well with similar results. Since Pi's are in short supply, I have been looking at the Wyse Thin Client like you had on your desk at the start of the video for setting my my environment.
I have Debian instructions in the blog post, and that should run on most other things. Since I'm relying on lxsession's specific autostart, it doesn't translate well to non-LXDE environments, but Debian offers LXDE as an option during install. There's a Linux mostly universal way to autostart programs for a user, but removing the existing desktop environment bits is easier with LXDE.
@@apalrdsadventures Started messing around with this over the weekend, and so far I can't seem to get it working. Followed all your instructions, made sure to change the node name in the thinclient script to my dns name and then added the ip to the node proxy, but I get an issue with connecting to the spiceproxy (in Debian). After watching your video several times, i thought this would be a breeze. And this is just for an Ubuntu VM, haven't attempted the Windows 10 VM yet.
@@richardmccreery Can you try running the script in a terminal to see if there are any CURL errors? Or does remote-viewer launch and never connect (it'll say something like 'connecting to graphics session')
Also, node name needs to exactly match the 'node' named in Proxmox. The script will strip everything after the first . (so if your Proxmox node named 'pve' has the DNS name 'pve.mydomain.net' it would correctly strip it) but if your node name in Proxmox doesn't match the DNS name it won't work. Using the DNS name is mostly a shortcut (since PROXY = NODE by default, you can type only the DNS name and it'll get both the IP via DNS and the Proxmox node name), but really what it needs is the address and Proxmox node name.
@@apalrdsadventures not sure how to run the curl script in terminal. when I select which user (VM), once I click login the screen goes blank (except for the background image) and nothing ever happens. I did make sure they both open using the spice console selection from proxmox, everything is good to that point so I know remote-viewer is working. My node name is pve2 so that is the only thing I need to modify in the thinclient script, assuming I haven't missed something between watching the video and following the blogpost. Being able to run from a thin client seems to be the only sticking point, oh and I started over using the raspberry pi os.
@@richardmccreery Once the desktop background comes up you should be able to right-click and select 'Open Terminal', then you can manually type '/usr/local/bin/thinclient 100' (or your VM ID)
If I have a Hp thinclient can I use rasbian OS on there and do the same thing? I have a couple of thes 2 cores 2 threads thin clients but never really had use for them to do anything but to use as a remote thin client.
Amazing work!
Thanks a lot!
how cool is this! Maybe expand it with central user management, and pxe would be great solution.
Remember that the VM believes it's connected to a physical monitor/keyboard/mouse and will probably require login of its own, so you could do user management there instead of at the thin client. It really depends on how you want to deploy it (VM per user or VM per thin client)
Ottima spiegazione, complimenti.
Glad you liked it!
How would you do this with Parsec or Moonlight? Thank for your videos!
I tried to do the sam on my banana pi m2 berry with raspbian installed and it doesn't work, it stucks after i try to login into the vm, does anyone know if it works on banana pi too and how to make it work? Thanks in advance
Got an clever ideas for how to do the same. But using only a terminal over SSH?
What do you mean? On a local system you can just use the console button in Proxmox with remote-viewer and skip the whole script process
Awsome!!!
Thanks!!
This is exactly what I’ve been needing to see. For the past 6-12 months I’ve wondered how to do this with my proxmox VMs. Thanks for the guides.
Curious how long it took for the spice client to show up though. Mine is taking quiet a while. In fact, the VM desktop hasn’t showed up yet. Not sure if I have the confit wrong or it’s a resource issue. What are some ways I can go about troubleshooting this issue?
It's usually fairly quick, a few seconds once the spice client opens. If it doesn't open, you can debug it (right-click on the blank desktop and run a terminal, then run the thinclient.sh manually to see the output).
Once the spice client connects, sometimes the VM has blanked the display (to 'power save' the monitor), and you have to move the mouse to get the VM to wake up.
I also have another video using the Proxmox VDI Client tool that a viewer wrote - that one doesn't require the thinclient.sh or any of that manual configuration.
@@apalrdsadventures initially it was user error - password had an incorrect character :) oops
Now I’m getting a permission denied error for the spiceproxy config file. What should be the permissions for that file? It says my local user owns the file.
Whatever user you're running as should have permissions for the file, and the same user should be running remote-viewer
Is this possible to set up so it has a gpu passed through so I can login via say nomachine or with a thin client?
Great video. I will try to do this in my homelab. Please invest in better microphone, sound quality is not very good.
Working on improving it in future videos
Hey guys, Nice extension of the previous "Raspberry Pi THIN CLIENT for Proxmox VMs", tutorial. However what has to be done on the Promox VM Side. I saw that Spice has to be Selected for both Display and USB but inside the VM what has to be done?
For Linux VMs, nothing has to be done. For Windows VMs, you either need to install the SPICE guest tools (spice-space.org) or disable 'tablet as pointer' in the VM options page. Windows will work with the graphics in VGA compatibility until you do this, but the mouse won't work without the tablet driver.
@@apalrdsadventures Thank you sir.
Hey man keep up the grind and the good work!!! Could you try and do this with mac os? or is it the same steps as shown?
macOS client (running as a thin client) or guest in Proxmox?
For the guest, as long as you can get macOS to run in Proxmox you can use this as a thin client for it.
For a client, you can get remote-viewer from Homebrew and the shell script should run, but beyond that its unlikely to work.
@@apalrdsadventures well just a VM on proxmox with a pi connecting to it :)
Oh yeah if it's running in a VM then you should be able to use this, as long as macOS can deal with old school VGA compatible virtual graphics
@@apalrdsadventures sounds amazing man, appreciate it
if the VM is GPU accelerated, will the remote client take advantage of that? like, can you play games at 60fps etc?
In my experience, not necessarily, since the SPICE (QXL) graphics is emulating a graphics card. The VM will have a non-accelerated QXL card in addition to the pass-through GPU. So you'd need the game to 'run' on the GPU's graphics output and mirror it to the SPICE output.
The last time I tested this I didn't have any HDMI headless dongles, so I couldn't mirror graphics across QXL and GPU. I might get back to this someday.
@@apalrdsadventures Thank you for the reply.
How can I disconnect the thin client as normal user?
Must to be the Pi 24/7 power on
It's in fullscreen mode so move the mouse to the top center of the screen and a little bar will pop up, and disconnect is an option there
Thanksl!
Enjoy! Hopefully it works well for you!
can you recommend a good proxmox course ?
LearnLinuxTV has a pretty thorough course on the core concepts of Proxmox - th-cam.com/play/PLT98CRl2KxKHnlbYhtABg6cF50bYa8Ulo.html
It's a bit lengthy, but he goes into a lot of detail on both containers and VMs on Proxmox.
I am getting an error while logging to rpi
Unable to connect to the graphics server spiceproxy
Almost always that means either the Proxmox server information is incorrect (node name / proxy IP address or DNS name), or the Proxmox user account is invalid or doesn't have permissions to access the VM. You can right-click on the background, open a terminal, and run the shell script manually to see errors from it.
@@apalrdsadventures actually i tried install the entire procedure in an alredy running pi
Today i managed to install and set up in a brand new set up
I tried running the script and my user say vdiubuntu throws an error saying line 49 thats the curl..... Doesn't have permission.
Can you help
The kiosk mode works like a charm
@@ajiahamed That would mean your username / password doesn't have permissions in Proxmox to access the console. Check that the realm is right (username = @pve), password and user are typed correctly, and permissions are right in Proxmox
@@apalrdsadventures i am getting this error
AUTH OK
./thinclient: line 49: spiceproxy: Permission denied
While exicuting as the vdiubuntu user in my pi
I checked as you said all are fine but when i log inn its says connecting to server and blank and then log out automaticaly
It sounds like a file access issue and not a curl or remote-viewer issue. You're running as user vdiubuntu from their home directory, correct? so spiceproxy should be a file in their home directory owned by vdiubuntu? Can you check and see if the file already exists and remove it?
Another possibility is that the user is correct but permissions are wrong in Proxmox - the first curl gets the user's auth token which verifies that the username/password is valid, the second curl requests the spiceproxy file and if the user was valid but didn't have permissions for that VM it would fail at the second curl.
Awlsom videos keep up the awlsom job
Glad you liked this one! I'm working on a netboot version which should be out in a few days.
old version of the scrip works for me , i wanted to test this new version and im getting an error msg " unable to connect to the graphic server spiceproxy --spice proxy:error resolving "mylab.local":name of service not known . in my node host file i have 192.168.2.5 mylab.local mylab so i think that thas where is getting mylab.local because i never added that info to the script i also want to ad that i dont have dns on my proxmox web interface i access with the ip