Installing ThinLinc Server for a thin client environment

This is a sub-page of my experience setting up a terminal server with ThinStation clients.

I experimented with NoMachine Enterprise Server, which was a good product, but pricey. I found ThinLinc, which had a feature that made me move that direction: the ability to customize (via a web configuration page) the menus users see and the apps they have access to.

First glitch was that the server installation halted with an error message. In the terminal, I discovered that it couldn't install pythonGTK, because it couldn't find Python-gtk2. ThinLinc knows about this, and this thread has a link here that got me past that hurdle.

cd ~/Downloads
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/pygtk/python-gtk2_2.24.0-5.1ubuntu2_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install ./python-gtk2_2.24.0-5.1ubuntu2_amd64.deb

This will give more errors, but following the apt-get suggestion (apt --fix-broken install) should fix it.

At this point, the installer GUI pulled up, the server installation completed, and I clicked through to begin the server setup. Here I hit a glitch with python-ldap. I found these notes, and after installing pip, I ran these commands to install python-ldap:

sudo apt install python-dev libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev gcc
pip install python-ldap

I reran the ThinLinc Setup, but for some reason, it still didn't work. Since I'm not planning to use LDAP, I let it go for now. (NOTE: you need to uncheck the option to install this package so that the setup will finish.)

Installing VirtualGL made a significant difference. Make sure to follow the directions explicitly, especially about when to install proprietary drivers.

1. Uninstall (or wait to install) nVidia proprietary drivers.
2. Install the VirtualGL package.
3. Install nVidia drivers.
4. Configure VirtualGL (vglserver_config). We said 'No' to all 3 restriction questions because we weren't concerned about the security risks in our situation, and we didn't know for sure that saying 'Yes' would work for us.

Next problem: VirtualGL doesn't play nicely with KTouch.