On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 2:10 PM, Warren Young warren@etr-usa.com wrote:
But, I'm kind of surprised that someone hasn't done a raspberry-pi type device that boots directly into x2go and comes out cheaper than a video card per seat. Haven't needed one badly enough to build it myself yet.
It should be trivial to set up an actual RPi to do that.
One of the options during installation is to boot into text mode instead of graphical mode. Once it’s booted, add the x2go startup commands in /etc/rc.local.
Done, no?
Not really. The beauty of the original K12LTSP respin was that just you did a normal fill-in-the-form install pretty much like any fedora/centos in a server with 2 NICs and you could plug in some diskless PCs and they came up working with applications ready to go. Compared to that, there's still a lot of do-it-yourself assembly required. I recall from the early K12LTSP mail list days that quite a few teachers were able to set up a classroom with very little admin knowledge.
Any dedicated hardware to do that will be considerably more expensive than an RPi.
First, the RPi benefits from massive scale. They’ve moved millions of the things. Dedicated x2go boxes will sell units on the scale of Wyse terminals, and consequently be relatively expensive.
Second, the RPi is set up as a nonprofit educational foundation. The last link or two in the chain does make a bit of money on it, but you aren’t paying for R&D or profit to the foundation. And, the last links in the chain can’t make a *lot* of money on RPis because they’re competing against the foundation itself, which sets a ceiling on how expensive a Pi can be through their Element14 relationship.
Agreed on the hardware front, but couldn't this be a canned image you copy to an SD card with some way to edit the target IP address in place without needing to rebuild it?