ThinLinc is a

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software r ...

remote desktop server developed by Cendio AB. The server software and the users' main desktops run on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

. Clients are available for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

, and a number of

thin client In computer networking, a thin client is a simple (low-performance) computer that has been optimized for establishing a remote connection with a server-based computing environment. They are sometimes known as ''network computers'', or in th ...

s. A browser client (Web Access) using HTML5 technologies is also available.

Protocols

ThinLinc uses

SSH The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH applications are based on a ...

for transport encryption and authentication, and

VNC Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is a graphical desktop-sharing system that uses the Remote Frame Buffer protocol (RFB) to remotely control another computer. It transmits the keyboard and mouse input from one computer to another, relaying the g ...

for graphics, keyboard and mouse. Access to client devices is provided through different open protocols such as

PulseAudio PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD, macOS, as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating ...

for sound (playback and recording), NFS for file system access (using a user space NFS server), and

Telnet Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control i ...

/RFC2217 for serial port access. Access to a client-side

Smart Card A smart card, chip card, or integrated circuit card (ICC or IC card) is a physical electronic authentication device, used to control access to a resource. It is typically a plastic credit card-sized card with an embedded integrated circuit (IC) c ...

s is provided via the

PC/SC PC/SC (short for "Personal Computer/Smart Card") is a specification for smart-card integration into computing environments. Microsoft has implemented PC/SC in Microsoft Windows 200x/XP and makes it available under Microsoft Windows NT/9x. A free im ...

interface using a proprietary protocol.

High performance graphics

Starting with version 3.0.0, JPEG compression and decompression has been accelerated using the

SIMD Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD can be internal (part of the hardware design) and it can be directly accessible through an instruction set architecture (ISA), but it should ...

extensions present in modern CPUs. Given a reasonably fast server, client, and network, it is possible to play back motion graphics in full screen mode. This can be done without any client side video decoder software or specialized handling of video. These performance enhancements also means that ThinLinc works very well in conjunction with the

VirtualGL VirtualGL is an Open-source software, open-source software package that redirects the 3D rendering commands from Unix and Linux OpenGL applications to 3D accelerator hardware in a dedicated server and sends the rendered output to a (thin client, ...

software, which provides hardware accelerated OpenGL on the server side. This allows 3D applications such as

Google Earth Google Earth is a computer program that renders a 3D computer graphics, 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposition, superimposing satellite images, aerial photography, and geog ...

to run with good performance. For example, the National Supercomputer Centre in Sweden (NSC) is using ThinLinc to run applications in their cluster remotely.

Usage

Many universities use ThinLinc to make system administration more centralized or only to make remote access to their computer systems available for students and staff. Example: University of Manitoba, Universität Zürich, Institut für Mathematik, Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, Luleå University. Other users are

Saab Group Saab AB (originally , later just SAAB and Saab Group) is a Swedish aerospace and defence company, founded in 1937. Headquartered in Stockholm, the development and the manufacturing is undertaken in Linköping. Saab produced automobiles from 194 ...

Volvo Cars Volvo Cars ( sv, Volvo personvagnar, styled VOLVO in the company's logo) is a Swedish multinational manufacturer of luxury vehicles headquartered in Torslanda, Gothenburg. The company manufactures SUVs, station wagons, and sedans. The company's ...

and

Karlstad Municipality Karlstad Municipality (''Karlstads kommun'') is a municipality in Värmland County in west central Sweden. Its seat is located in the city of Karlstad. The present municipality was established in 1971 when the former City of Karlstad was amalg ...

. Since

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word '' ...

announced that they will discontinue their development of

Sun Ray The Sun Ray was a stateless thin client computer (and associated software) aimed at corporate environments, originally introduced by Sun Microsystems in September 1999 and discontinued by Oracle Corporation in 2014. It featured a smart card r ...

, there has been a big interest to replace it with a ThinLinc solution. The customers are generally organizations with extensive in-house knowledge of how to set up advanced computer systems, but partners resell the product as a part of a complete solution.

Open source software

ThinLinc includes many components that are

Free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

and Cendio AB, the developer, is a driving force in many of those projects. Notable projects that are used are

TigerVNC TigerVNC is an open source Virtual Network Computing (VNC) server and client software, started as a fork of TightVNC in 2009. The client supports Windows, Linux and macOS. The server supports Linux. There is no server for macOS and the Windows ser ...

, noVNC,

OpenSSH OpenSSH (also known as OpenBSD Secure Shell) is a suite of secure networking utilities based on the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, which provides a secure channel over an unsecured network in a client–server architecture. Network Working Gr ...

, and

. Source code is provided in the same archives as the binary versions.

References

External links