A Raspberry Pi 4 costs little, uses a few watts and is silent: a natural terminal for a Windows desktop. OpenThinRDP builds as an SD card image for it, the same system as on a PC: the Windows sign-in at power on, RDP over UDP, sound, USB and the same central management.
Status, said plainly: experimental. The image is built and tested in emulation (QEMU), not yet on a real board. If you have a Pi 4 and an hour, your report is what moves it forward.
- Boards: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 2 GB or more, the Pi 400 and the CM4. The Pi 5 is not supported yet.
- The same system as on a PC: kiosk, settings dialog, management folder, signed updates, FreeRDP with UDP, on Debian 13 arm64 with Debian's own kernel.
- No installer: the image is written to an SD card or a USB disk and boots as an installed system.
- Browsers: Chromium, Firefox or Brave for the web page buttons; Chrome and Edge do not exist for ARM Linux.
- To check on a real board: video output on both HDMI ports, sound over HDMI and USB, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and smoothness of video in the session. The list: arm.md.
- Download the image from the pre-release.
- Write it to an SD card with Raspberry Pi Imager (Use custom), balenaEtcher or
dd. - Start the Pi, set your Windows PC or your RD Connection Broker, sign in.
- Tell us what worked in the discussions.
| Raspberry Pi 4 | Used x86 thin client (Wyse 5070, HP t630, Futro S740) | |
|---|---|---|
| Status with OpenThinRDP | experimental | supported: x86 is what runs in production |
| Price | the board plus power supply, case and SD card | often less, with case, power supply and storage included |
| Storage | SD card (slower, wears out) or USB disk | eMMC or M.2 |
| Video decoding in the session | to be checked | proven on x86 |
For an office today, a used x86 thin client is the safer choice (which one). For a test at home, or to help the project, the Pi is welcome.
This page is docs/guides/raspberry-pi-thin-client.md as published on GitHub, where the documentation, the releases and the discussions are.