Hi,
This is my first post. So apologies if this was asked before. I could not find any related posts. Let me know if you need any additional information.
I’ve been enjoying thinlinc for a few years now. I use it to access my desk machine with Fedora when working from home.
I used to be able to create a remote session while logged into the server. There were a few issues (e.g. opening an app in the remote session resulting in the app opening in the server active session rather than the remote one) but nothing major.
I updated my computer a few weeks ago and to my surprise whenever I try to start a remote session while logged into the server, the thinlinc profile chooser appears in the active session of the server rather than being forwarded to my remote session. Hence, I get stuck and I can’t connect remotely. Is there any way to forward the thinlinc profile chooser ?
One way around is to keep the server with no sessions running (in the gdm screen). For some reason when I do this, then the server does not allow direct interaction and I have to reboot. I checked that the daemon for the gdm sleep inactivity is off. I’d like to keep the same account for both connections.
As you have noticed, this has to do with the fact that nowadays, most desktops don’t work well with multiple sessions for one user. While ThinLinc supports this, that’s not enough. The desktop environment (both the one on the local display, and the one in ThinLinc) and the rest of the Linux system must also have proper support for multiple graphical same-user sessions.
It is common that, for example, GNOME behaves just like you have described, where the profile chooser (and other apps) open on the local display instead of on the remote one. An option would be to test a different desktop, such as MATE or XFCE, both locally and in ThinLinc. Though I can’t promise that it will work.
I understand, but sadly — the reality is that most of the Linux world is moving away from this possibility.
A very different option would be to set up the server to locally run a simple kiosk UI running as a kiosk-user. This kiosk UI could be configured to only show the ThinLinc client log in window (instead of GDM). This way, when you want to use the local display attached to the server, you would also be expected to connect to the ThinLinc session (on the same machine).