One common support issue we get is about the error message “No executable profiles could be found” that appears when trying to login to a ThinLinc session.
The most common cause of this is that a session cant start because no working desktop environment is installed on the system. Many Linux distributions are available as “minimal” installs, this could mean that a desktop isn’t included.
To check which desktop environments you have installed, you can run this command:
ls /usr/share/xsessions
Examples of desktop environments are GNOME, XFCE, Mate, KDE and Cinnamon.
Note that if you run a ThinLinc cluster, only the Agents need to have working desktop environments.
Most Linux distributions will have a way of installing entire desktop environments with a single command. For example, to install the MATE desktop on CentOS (must have EPEL repositories enabled):
$ sudo yum groupinstall "MATE Desktop"
On Fedora (you may also want to install the mate-applications group):
ThinLinc includes profiles for most popular desktops. However, if no ThinLinc profile is available yet for your desktop - fortunately, you can add your own. This is done either directly in the configuration file (default location is /opt/thinlinc/etc/conf.d/profiles.hconf) or by using the Web Admin Interface.
Aside from learning from the existing profiles you can find information regarding each configuration parameter for a new profile here:
what to do if I want to use ThinLinc on ZorinOS (which is based on Ubuntu, with GNOME but a custom theme)? I get the “No executable profiles could be found”. The topic regarding what is a profile and what are the requirements for a profile to work are not well documented. It just says “Note that other criteria must also be satisfied for a profile to be available to a user” in the web administration. But it does not say what these criteria are, or where I can read more about them.
ls /usr/share/xsessions yields two files, zorin.desktop and zorin-xorg.desktop.
Contents:
zorin.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Zorin Desktop
Comment=This session logs you into Zorin Desktop
Exec=env GNOME_SHELL_SESSION_MODE=zorin /usr/bin/gnome-session --session=zorin
TryExec=/usr/bin/gnome-shell
Type=Application
DesktopNames=zorin:GNOME
X-GDM-SessionRegisters=true
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=gnome-session-3.0
zorin-xorg.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Zorin Desktop on Xorg
Comment=This session logs you into Zorin Desktop
Exec=env GNOME_SHELL_SESSION_MODE=zorin /usr/bin/gnome-session --session=zorin
TryExec=/usr/bin/gnome-shell
Type=Application
DesktopNames=zorin:GNOME
X-GDM-SessionRegisters=true
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=gnome-session-3.0
Any help is kindly appreciated!
EDIT: I figured it out. I just needed to enter the name of that .desktop file. Then it worked. And sound works too. Awesome stuff.
We are aware of a number of distribution-specific DE variants (Budgie, COSMIC, Zorin, etc) which do work with ThinLinc, but aren’t provided in the default configuration. So it’s great to see that it’s at least “discoverable” how to do this yourself if needed.
