Arch Linux

ElDani

Member

Registered: 2019-06-18

Posts: 6

Multi seat and Thin clients

Hello everyone.

I'm a brand new Arch Linux user since earlier today. While I have years of sporadic CLI experience around web- and db daemons to maintain web-based scripting projects, I never actually had to care about the server administration slash hardware side of things. Now I'm setting up my own home-server that I'm planning to run a whole host of stuff on. I can upgrade the CPU and go from 2 cores/4 threads@3.2GHz to 4/8@3.6-3.9 if I really need to, but that's very premature right now.

For a start I've done the simple things, such as installing a light DE (I know LXDE from lubuntu and like it well enough), getting the sound to work, setting up docker and a basic LAMP stack. For someone who's never done any of that, it was both fun and a challenge arriving at a working configuration mostly by trial and error

A lot of the simple stuff I'll be able to get going myself, sooner or later, but I do need some help on the conceptual side of things. Here's what I want to run on this hardware:

1. kodi

2. docker (PiHole, VPN + socks proxy, etc)

3. Permanent X session for a small number of GUI applications that have no daemon or equivalent replacement

4. Permanent X session(s) for use with "thin client" tablet(s)

5. VNC remote control for any of these X sessions

The hardware I've installed Arch on has two outputs, one HDMI and a DP, but only the HDMI is connected to my TV screen. The thing with the multiple permanent X sessions may be too much for the hardware (I'm running this on a minimalist Athlon 200GE APU with 16GB RAM, or 13.6GB after the iGPU allocation), but since gaming is not one of the objectives, I want to try it.

I got a surplus wireless remote (has mouse/keyboard functionality) with a USB dongle from a work colleague, which was previously connected to his Raspberry Pi. On Windows I am presently using a DIY programmable keypad with all kinds of custom shortcuts. I aim to connect this to my Linux server in order to control some of those GUI applications I mentioned above (in part using Wine) and maybe some other stuff too. This has worked great on Windows without having the screen on all the time.

Now my main question is how to set this all up. Running kodi on the HDMI output is dead simple, using an USB wireless remote/keyboard is no problem either, because it worked immediately after plugging the dongle in. Even starting the VNC server (I started off with X11vnc) is easy enough, although I will probably not want to use the less efficient (and probably more resource intensive) polling method when there are ways to run multiple screens with a virtual framebuffer on Xvnc.

How do I do the latter so all sessions are started at boot time and aren't terminated when a VPN client disconnects, all that with a predictable port so the client connections are one-click (just a note: I do plan to add firewall rules to limit connections to the client IP addresses). Most importantly, how would I separate USB devices and assign them to specific virtual screens? Is that even possible? Would kodi have to run in its own X session to achieve this device separation, or can I configure it using the standalone?

I know this all sounds a bit convoluted, but my goal in this venture has from the start been to reduce power consumption and undesired noise. In the past months and years I've noticed that my desktop PC and laptop run a lot longer than I wanted. In addition I would like to repurpose some older and by now unused Android tablets and get some productivity out of them for both myself and the family. We have great wi-fi access in our back garden too

Best regards,
Dan