Running the ThinLinc client on ARM64 Linux

Knowledge Base
1

Currently, the ThinLinc client only ships as a 32-bit binary (armhf) for Linux on ARM. This client is still compatible with ARM64, but requires the 32-bit variants of glibc and libx11 to be installed on the machine first.

For example, on Debian and its derivatives (Ubuntu, Raspbian, etc.), these 32-bit libraries, and the ThinLinc client, can be installed as follows:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture armhf
sudo apt update
sudo apt install libc6:armhf libx11-6:armhf
sudo apt install ./thinlinc-client_*_armhf.deb
2

Note that on RaspberryPi 5, and likely future Raspberry Pi devices, Raspbian has switched from 4k pages to 16k pages. In practice, this means that many 32-bit ARM applications, including the ThinLinc client, will no longer function as intended.

When running ThinLinc, this issue will result in the following line being written when trying to start tlclient:

/opt/thinlinc/bin/../lib/tlclient/tl-fontcache: error while loading shared libraries: libpthread.so.0: ELF load command address/offset not page-aligned 
/opt/thinlinc/bin/../lib/tlclient/tlclient.bin: error while loading shared libraries: libpthread.so.0: ELF load command address/offset not page-aligned 
The execution of the ThinLinc client failed. A common reason for 
this is that you are using the wrong architecture. Perhaps you 
are running a 32 bit client on a 64 bit system without support 
for 32 bit applications?

At the time of writing, you can work around this Raspbian issue by using a kernel with 4k pages. This can be done by setting kernel=kernel8.img in /boot/firmware/config.txt.