 We got this Raspberry Pi about a month ago, and maybe a little bit longer, but it has been a fun little toy to play with. We've tried a lot of different things on there, which is just some of the research we do before we make some videos, and I've been really impressed with the performance of the Pi here. One of the things I wanted to test out in is the ability for it to run X2Go, because the idea of having a really inexpensive low wattage box that you can put inside of a network and then have full UI access remotely in a really compact package seemed like a neat idea. So I was like, okay, how well will this run? Surprisingly well, and I wanted to try a few different desktops and do a demonstration on how this works. Before we jump into that, let's talk about sponsors real quick, IT Pro TV and Tech Supply Direct. Two great sponsors of this channel. I have offer codes for both of them down below. The offer code for Tech Supply Direct gets you 10% off. They have an amazing selection of servers and some of them that we have used here for our lab demos and some we've purchased for other client projects and things like that. You can get some great servers that still have lots of life in them that are pretty reasonably priced and then further that by another 10% off with our offer code. Also IT Pro TV, I can only teach you so much. There is so much out there and a lot of times a lot of job requirements or certifications and further learning is really key to staying relevant in the IT industry. IT Pro TV is not just a sponsor. We started out by using them. They're a great service. They have a wealth of knowledge on a lot of different topics. Go ahead and check them out. IT Pro TV and we have an offer code for them as well. Back to the Raspberry Pi. So I have an entire video showing you how to load X to go and I'm not going to cover that part in detail but it's pretty straightforward. There's not any gotchas that I had when setting it up on a Raspberry Pi. Pretty straightforward but we'll run over the basics real quick here. So I have X to go clients set up on my laptop here which is running PopOS. That question seems to come up all the time while you're running. And it's sudo apt-get install X to go server and it's already a latest version. It'll install other dependencies when you put in X to go server. That part was pretty straightforward. Next you have to load some desktop environments because the desktop environment that a Raspberry Pi image comes with. This is a straight Raspbian image. New one just downloaded the other day and kept up to date. That does not have many desktops installed. Well none of them I should say that work with X to go. So we had to run sudo dsksel and we threw a couple desktops in here. So if you run this, you can choose the environments. So Debian desktop environment we chose X, Xfce, KD, Plasma, Cinnamon, Mate and LXDE. So those are all set up on here and of course SSH has to be turned on. I just went ahead and enabled it through the Raspberry Pi software and I loaded my SSH keys in here. So those of you wondering why I'm logging in without a password, I'll show you right here on the settings. We go to session preferences. There's the IP address to the Pi. These are named Pi 22 and try auto login via SSH agent. That's how we're logging in here. And we're going to start with the LXDE desktop and let's pull up Htop here. What you have here with Htop is not too much memory usage because well, not much going on. Now the first thing I'm going to comment is, and I'll leave a link to my whole more in-depth X to go video, but right here you cannot connect to local desktop. That just doesn't work inside of there. The reason why, if I understood correctly by reading some of the notes on this, there's not a way for the GPU to render a local session back through. So maybe it's something that will be added in the future. I don't know if there's a big push for it, but what you're doing essentially is you're not connecting to local desktop, but you're spawning a new session. And the first session we'll start with though is LXDE. So hit OK. And I just got it set to this, but we can run it at 1920, 1080. That's not a problem. Just you can't run it. You can't run full screen, but you just can't connect to the local display. That's the part I just wanted to make sure is clear on that. It will keep giving an error, and it won't lock up or crash, but it'll kind of get stuck in a loop on there, and you'll have to kill some processes that get running. So go ahead and connect with this, and we chose the LXDE desktop. And it's reasonably fast. You can see the pie, it's not as instantaneous as it is on a much faster computer, but within a reasonable amount of time, and I left the CPU, so you can see how much processor power is being used up here, it loaded LXDE reasonably fast. And we can open up things, internet, I'll pull ZenMap open, which is not running as root. One of the ideas I have for how this is a really effective tool is if you needed a low powered box to put inside of a network to enumerate it, and you don't want to necessarily have something big, bulky, or expensive, you could always set up this with either a versus SSH shell or some other connectivity, or just open port 22 so you can get to it and make sure you have key only authentication and lock it down, but it makes an easy way for you to be remotely in another network and scan it. So these are, you know, different tools you may want to use, you have access to a browser of course, and it opens up the browser reasonably fast. So let's actually open up Firefox, and you can see that's obviously going to pull more memory than a whole desktop environment will be once we open up a website. So here's Firefox, and let's open up my website because I know it has a lot of intense graphics on it, which is going to be a bit more of a struggle for the pie. So you're watching the memory usage ramp up over here, processors are the cores I should say are getting pinned, and but it's rendering it, and this is completely usable. You're seeing the video, a little bit of lag, but not unusable, but if you're doing things like managing a firewall remotely or, you know, different web-enabled devices that are local to external network, you want easy access to them, having a pie inside that network kind of makes an easy way to do that, like I said, for network enumeration or things like that. And maybe in the future, I'll be doing some Parrot or Kali Linux. I'm going to load on here and give that a try with X to go, because this is also a way you can have a basic pen testing box inside of a network for different testing. Raspberry Pi seems to run that perfectly fine. So let's go ahead and end this session here. So we'll go here, we'll log out and shut it down. And over here, let's try the next one. Now, I'm going to try KDE Last. I did it almost as a joke. KDE will open eventually, but it definitely causes the machine just to hang and stutter. But the Mate desktop, which I believe is pronounced Mate, this one works quite well. The only kind of hangup I've had with the Mate desktop is the corner where the Bluetooth is sometimes, and see if it does it this time or not. It's a maybe. Sometimes I've run an internal problem where the top corner doesn't, it works, but it doesn't display properly where the network and Bluetooth are. And oh, good, it did it this time. It just kind of jumbles them together. You can still click on them. They still work. It just has jumbled things together. I can get to the network. I can get to the sound options. It just kind of makes this weird, even if you change the screen size. Oh, that's how I fixed it. It's kind of jumbles them together a little bit. I'm not exactly sure why. And when you resize the screen both ways, it starts working perfectly fine. Now it says it could not switch to modern application, but same thing. You can still open up things perfectly fine. GNVue, not using that much memory Mate doesn't command too much processor time or memory time to run, so you can run applications on here without sucking it all up to the desktop. So we'll go record your systems and we'll log out of the pie, log out. And you can also suspend these X2Go sessions, too. I don't know if you noticed that was in there on the list, but like I said, it's the standard X2Go like I've demoed before in my longer video about that. Let's try another desktop. Let's try Cinnamon because I did load that one as well. Takes a little bit longer to get the Cinnamon desktop going. Now this is also a problem I had. You are currently running in fallback mode. Do you want to restart Cinnamon? No. It does not run in... It does look nice, but it does not run in like its full mode. I'm not really dug into the why or what parameter you need to add on there, but it won't load Cinnamon on top of it. Cinnamon is basically not fully functioning in X2Go. Like I said, I haven't done a lot of research in it, but it will work, but it switches back and basically falls back to the Mate desktop, but with a few extra features on there. But it does solve this problem. This works fine in here, but it's weirdly offset when you try to click on things. It opens them over there, which is just kind of strange. Even if you do a resize, I'm not really sure the cause of that problem. But so I'm going to say Cinnamon desktop, and it doesn't work so well. So we'll log on to that. Now let's try XFCE. So we got that on there as well. There we go. I'm doing all this in real time. I'm not editing out any of these. I wanted to show exactly how fast it was so you can get a feel for it. Now XFCE, you know, this works really well on here. I was impressed. This is super lightweight. And let me switch over to here. It's still, you know, it's using some memory to open a Firefox, but as far as opening fast and everything else, this one just kind of felt very responsive. Obviously the browser being the browser, but in terms of the other applications on here, it works quite well. Like it opens up fast, the no lag on the screen or anything like that. XFCE seems to be the lightest weight one here. So that definitely is a good choice there. And no messing up over here in the corners. These work perfectly fine to be able to get to wired VPN connections, et cetera, et cetera. No problems there. Log out, shut down, works fine. So we're going to head and log out. Now the last one we're going to go ahead and try is KDE. And I already know Nome has some issues as well on here. KDE does as well. And we'll go ahead and connect to it and watch what happens to the processor on this. It's going to completely pin it just trying to open KDE on here. But it will eventually open, which is kind of neat. So it gives me hope for maybe a future generation of Raspberry Pi or maybe they come up with a plasma light for people that really like the customization of the interface. And maybe they'll figure out a way to make it work a little better. But there's certainly going to be some challenges. You can see it just racking up the memory here. And all we're trying to do is load the desktop. Come on. It's still thinking. It chews on this a little while before it even gets to somewhat usable. The Pi is just not really cut out for this. Let's log in. Yes, the password in our Pi is 123456. When we set up these demos, I use easy passwords because I have to type them sometimes a lot when you're setting up YouTube demos. Let's see. Let's try and open up something in here. There's the Activities window. Let's actually also open with Dolphin. It kind of reminds me of like a Windows crash trying to run it on here. The Pi just can't quite handle it. And it just doesn't work well. So it's way laggy in terms of screen. So does it work? That's subjective. I wouldn't really call that working. We're going to say kind of working on there. So all right, that session is closed now. But the Pi does work with X2Co. That was kind of the point of the video. And we haven't had any problems with it. As long as you're using one of the lighter weight desktops like Mate or XFCE, it seems to work really, really well on the Pi. This makes a great device to deploy remotely for low wattage, low cost, and have a pretty basic easy system by which you can access other systems. Like I said, some of the use cases are if you have to enumerate a network, or you have to monitor some other remote. We actually have a client with some HVAC systems. And this might be an interesting way for easy access if you need something with a web browser to access it. But you don't want to leave a computer on site running all the time, just so you can get into the interface and the control interfaces, which are all web driven. And it's local to the network on there. The last thing I want to try is published applications to see how well they work on there. That's the only piece I didn't try yet, so we're going to try this together and get a published application to work. This is the ability that X2Co has. And X2Co clients work with both Windows and Linux. The server only runs, well, there's ways to, but specifically running it on Linux, not really Windows. But now let's try actually running a published application for the Pi. Now to run a published application, we're going to do this. Do that, and just paste it in here. Single application, the command's going to be the path to it, so that should work right there. And now it should run Firefox running from the Pi, but locally here. That's still that stuck KDE session, I think. And there we go. Firefox running on the Raspberry Pi but being rendered locally here. So you can see when we open up, let's open up a few things. We'll open up my launch system site, and we'll open another tab. And all this is happening on the Pi, but bringing the application local to me. This is actually a really interesting use case if you ever want to run the browser on your computer, but have the backend on the other computer, which means it's accessing that computer's local network resources. So this Pi would be actually using the web browser but running from the IP address of wherever it's located and have access to those local resources. So that's kind of neat, and it does work right here. You can see it pulling a lot of data or a lot of processing power in the background here, but published applications work fine too. I'll leave links on my access to go where I go more in depth on how all of these work. Like I said, you can get really in depth with it. It's got a lot of features. X2Go is a really powerful tool and works really well, but it works great with the Raspberry Pi 4. I was really impressed with the performance of it. It's a very usable product. All right, thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. If you'd like to hire us, head over to launchsystems.com, fill out our contact page, and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on. 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