[X2Go-Dev] Raspberry Pi as cheap Thin Client

[Stefan Baur]

Am 10.01.2014 13:46, schrieb Javier Cacheiro Lopez:

>  From my point of view one of the advantadges of RPi is that you can
> easily deploy new OS images by just replacing the SD card with a
> different one (all v1 or v2 RPi have basically the same hardware ).
>
> So in general I would just update one of the RPi nodes, check everything
> works and after that take the SD card to a standard computer and make a
> dd image of it. Then with that image you can update the SD cards of the
> rest of RPi.

That's called sneakernet administration, and may work when all the 
computers are in close proximity, which may not well be the case here. 
It also means increased wear and tear on the SD card connector.

> If you can afford having some extra SD cards then you can just replace
> one SD card with the updated one.

I believe if the poster mentioned cameroon, bridging the digital gap, 
and low-power, cheap devices, it is unlikely that he has much of a budget.

> In case you prefer network updates take into account that the network in
> the RPi is not especially fast because the NIC is only 100Mbits and the
> processor is also a limiting factor for the speed if using encrypted
> transfers (like scp).

Why would that be a problem? You're not updating at boot, but "behind 
the scenes" in the other partition/directory while the main operating 
system is already running. if your updater uses rsync or wget, it's 
possible to resume where it last left off, and to throttle transfer 
speed. So you can set it up in a way that it takes 2 hours to transfer 
the image, why would a "low" transfer speed caused by 100MBit/s instead 
of 1GBit/s matter at all? It's done when it's done, and nothing breaks 
if transfer is aborted.

-Stefan