Update
As promised, I’ve made a VirtualGL install and configuration guide based on this instalation, but may help with other distros. Check Here: VirtualGL Guide
Also, here’s a kind of testing and troubleshooting (sanity check) that I made:
Testing if everything is working fine
The easiest way to test is to go to another computer on the same network, install ThinLinc client and try to connect to your ThinLinc Server. If you were configuring it remotely through SSH and your machine is behind a NAT, you should read the “How about the ThinLinc Client? How do I access my ThinLinc Server?” section in this guide.
1. Open your ThinLinc Client in another computer and input the server address, username and password:
2. You should see the ThinLinc’s welcome screen:
If you instead only see a blue screen like below and then you log in to the system, possibly it means that you didn’t install the GTK+ Dependencies:
I don’t know if there are some other problems, but if you want to fix it, refer to the ThinLinc Server installation on this guide.
3. You now are remotely connected to your ThinLinc Server
What if it’s not working?
I’ve been through this and it took me some time to figure out what was wrong. Here are some screens that represent that something is wrong. If you can reproduce some of them, maybe you have to check if everything was installed according to this guide.
1. Missed to install GTK+ Dependencies for ThinLinc: You’re not going to be able to run Click to Install.desktop and use GUI Installer and you’re not going to see the ThinLinc’s Welcome screen. To fix it, refer to step 9 on the ThinLinc Server Installation CLI or step 2 on the ThinLinc Server Installation GUI on this guide.
2. No sound on local machine or remote machine: ThinLinc sets pulseaudio to forward the sound from the remote to the client machine. However I’ve experienced that a local login concurrently with a remote ThinLinc session for the same user could make the sound stop for the local user. To fix that, the local user could kill pulseaudio (pulseaudio -k) and restart it (pulseaudio -D). That happened a lot when I left the computer at the TV and remotely accessed it through ThinLinc using the same username simultaneously. I don’t recommend you to have a local and a remote graphical login to prevent those small bugs.
3. Some application refuses to open because it says that I don’t have a compatible GPU or game simply doesn’t work or FPS rate is very slow
OpenGL applications (including games) need that ThinLinc server machine has VirtualGL configured so that it can use hardware accelerated graphics properly. Check VirtualGL configuration for GPU hardware accelerated graphics on ThinLinc
How about Steam Games? Is it possible?
Some OpenGL games will work hardware-accelerated on VirtualGL and ThinLinc, but you have to set the “LAUNCH OPTIONS” for that game. You’re going to get some frameskips because of the way ThinLinc sends the images, but there is a workaround. I’ve made a Reddit post that teaches and demonstrates how to do it in detail - https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/qkrhv6/i_shared_the_better_computer_at_home_with_my/ and a video - ThinLinc+VirtualGL+Steam Link: Headless Remote Desktop Gaming Linux Machine - YouTube . Other games may also be playable, but I didn’t test it.