Half a year has passed since the release of 4.16.0, meaning it’s time for ThinLinc 4.17.0. Besides simplifying deployment of ThinLinc in highly secure environments, ThinLinc 4.17.0 also ships with tab completion on the command line, as well as compatibility with Ubuntu 24.04.
Simplifying security compliance
The primary focus in this release is making ThinLinc easier to use in environments with high security standards. First and foremost, both the ThinLinc client and server can now be installed on FIPS enabled systems. My colleague Tobias describes this further in a separate blog post. As this is something that has been commonly requested from our more security-minded customers for quite some time, we are glad to finally deliver.
Another request from these customers has been a way to verify the authenticity of new ThinLinc releases. We therefore now sign all client and server RPM packages. The signatures can be validated as follows:
$ unzip tl-4.17.0-server.zip $ cd tl-4.17.0-server/ $ sudo rpm --import THINLINC-GPG-KEY # Trust the public key $ rpm --checksig packages/thinlinc-*.rpm # Verify the signature of the RPMs packages/thinlinc-server-4.17.0-3647.x86_64.rpm: digests signatures OK
The public key, THINLINC-GPG-KEY, is included in the client and server ZIP archives.
Easier administration
On a more fun and less compliance-focused note, ThinLinc now has tab completion support in Bash for all command-line tools part of the ThinLinc server. Internally, we’ve found great use of this feature, especially for completing configuration parameter names for tl-config:
This makes playing with your ThinLinc configuration a lot easier. If you’re used to configuring ThinLinc using your text editor, we urge you to give tl-config a second chance. The improved discoverability is a game changer.
Ubuntu 24.04 compatibility
Finally, the ThinLinc server can now be installed on Ubuntu 24.04 without any workarounds. Due to changes to the file hierarchy that shipped in Ubuntu 24.04, we had to change up our packaging a little.
Open-source involvement
Besides our work on ThinLinc itself, we continue to invest time and money in the open-source projects that power ThinLinc.
Most prominently, we have worked on adding DRI3 support to the TigerVNC display server. We hope that this, in the future, will give ThinLinc performant hardware accelerated OpenGL and Vulkan graphics easily accessible out-of-the-box. If this is something that interests you, we urge you to try out the latest TigerVNC beta and letting us in on your results.
We are also giving some love to the back and forward mouse buttons in TigerVNC. The lack of support for these buttons is something that has annoyed us over the years. We are therefore happy to have a protocol extension and implementation that is soon ready for integration into TigerVNC and hopefully in ThinLinc.
As always, this release contains numerous minor enhancements across the board to make ThinLinc even more functional, easy to use, and secure. For the full list of changes, see the ThinLinc 4.17.0 Release Notes. The 4.17.0 server and clients are available on our download page. As Cendio and ThinLinc steadily grows, we have high ambitions to provide an even more streamlined product going forward. We look forward to hearing what you think on the ThinLinc Community.