This is an old revision of the document!
During the time of Debian Wheezy being Debian's stable release, we started developing a new ThinClientEdition (TCE) - one that is based on Debian-Live and thus does no longer rely on NFS. Instead, the entire image is loaded into the RAM of the ThinClient machine.
The disadvantage is that your ThinClient now needs at least 1 GB of RAM.
However, the huge advantage is that there no longer is a need for any high-availibility setup concerning NFS. All you need is an HTTP or FTP server with a dedicated IP, if you want to use netbooting. It is also possible to deploy the image to the ThinClient's local storage, if present, and have it update in the background. Also, making changes/updating the NFS-based TCE was rather finicky - with the current TCE, you build and deploy a new image every time you make a change, and you can test it on a single client without interrupting your production environment.
We've also received reports that the old NFS-based TCE wouldn't work with Jessie, or at least it was very hard to get it to work. Our current TCE works just fine with Jessie, and we expect it to work in Stretch and hopefully in Buster (Stretch+1) as well. The one catch is that the live-build package in Debian/the Debian-Live project is currently looking for a new maintainer - so there is a slim chance that live-build might be removed from Debian Buster, especually if no new maintainer steps up and the live-build replacement that is currently in the works contains all the required functionality of live-build by then.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git-core live-build live-config-doc live-manual-html live-boot-doc
Change to a directory where you want to save your builds, and run the following commands:
DIR=./live-build-x2go-$(date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S") # this will create a timestamped subdirectory mkdir -p $DIR cd $DIR # Select ONE of the following ARCH lines and comment out the others #ARCH="-a amd64 -k amd64" # for 64-Bit builds #ARCH="-a i386 -k 686-pae" # 32-Bit, larger memory footprint, but faster performance on i686 and newer ARCH="-a i386 -k 586" # 32-Bit, smallest memory footprint lb config ... lb build lb clean # optional command to clean up afterwards -> saves some space