Installation
First of all, download the distribution’s image from the official website. The ISO is around 200 megabytes, so it should go fairly quickly. The image can then be used in multiple ways: you can perform a network boot, install the OS on the hard drive, use it as in a live session, or run network diagnostics or memory tests. I simply ran a live session as a test, but the other options are also straightforward.
First Steps
The desktop looks very similar to that of Windows. I guess the purpose is to avoid confusion for the majority of users.
But since 2XOS is a thin client system, we don’t really care about what the desktop looks like. It comes with all the necessary tools to configure and manage the physical computer, but the efforts are mainly focused on remote connections. In fact, the only side programs on the computer are Opera, Skype, and PDF Reader.
However, I really liked the system configuration tool, which I found very complete. It has what you expect from a configuration program in terms of resolution and other settings. In addition to that, it has been enhanced to manage the connections to the network efficiently, making easy join farms or getting information about the current one.
And my favorite feature concerns the backup settings: it is easy to save the settings of the current computer in order to import them to another one later. This feature can save you a lot of time, especially when you want to install a thin client system on a dozen computers in a row.
Finally, the icons on the desktop represent the most-used types of remote connections for a thin client, like Citrix and VMWare, and a nice shortcut: all you have to do is enter the address, the username, and the password, and you are done. The protocol you use doesn’t matter: the procedure is the same.
Conclusion
As I said earlier, 2X ThinClientOS is one among many. ThinStation is also quite popular and relatively similar, but I have to admit that I found 2XOS very simple to use. There are some features that you can generally expect with thin client systems, like the network boot, the Citrix protocol, or the boot-on-lan capacity. Maybe next week we will see how to install a special version of Ubuntu with a built-in thin client system. If you know any other thin client systems, or have any experience to share about the subject, you can let us know in the comments right now.
