Ubuntu® and Debian®

The following information relates to installation of ThinLinc on an Ubuntu or Debian platform. Please read the information here before installing ThinLinc, or when encountering problems.

Firefox won't run inside a ThinLinc session

On Ubuntu 21.10 and newer, Firefox is only available as a “snap”, rather than a normal application package. However, because of a bug in Ubuntu, snap applications do not work correctly in ThinLinc. A regular version of Firefox can be installed by enabling an alternative Ubuntu repository.

Another option is to relax display access restrictions and allow all applications that are running as the correct user. To allow this, create the file /opt/thinlinc/etc/xstartup.d/00-xhost-localuser.sh with the following content:

xhost +SI:localuser:`id -un`

Polkit authentication dialogs during login

Recent versions of Unity, GNOME and KDE contain bugs ([1],[2]) which causes Polkit authentication dialogs to appear during login, when resizing the session etc. It is possible to prevent such dialogs by creating the file /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/40-thinlinc-no-auth-dialogs.pkla with this content:

[Prevent auth dialogs in ThinLinc]
Identity=unix-user:*
Action=org.freedesktop.color-manager.create-device;org.freedesktop.color-manager.create-profile;org.freedesktop.color-manager.delete-device;org.freedesktop.color-manager.delete-profile;org.freedesktop.color-manager.modify-device;org.freedesktop.color-manager.modify-profile;org.debian.apt.update-cache
ResultAny=no
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=yes

For more information, see Bug 5584.

Gnome screensaver crash

A bug in Gnome screensaver causes it to crash when logging in to ThinLinc. It is recommended to uninstall the package until the bug can be resolved:

$ sudo apt remove gnome-screensaver