Category: Ubuntu

Using hypervisors is great. However, you will end up in whole “disks” with partitions in an LVM logical volume. And “from the outside” (e.g. when you are trying to rescue data on that damn disk) is not that easy.

pvscan will give you the lvs. But there inside is nothing you can mount directly.

Solution: kpartx

kpartx -av /dev/mapper/yourvg–yourlv

add map yourvg–yourlvp1 (253:26): 0 2048 linear 253:21 2048
add map yourvg–yourlvp2 (253:27): 0 67102720 linear 253:21 4096

This will read the partition table of the lv and add additional endpoints to the /dev/mapper to mount them.

mount -oro /dev/mapper/yourvg–yourlvp1 /mnt

Source: http://www.microhowto.info/howto/mount_a_partition_located_inside_a_file_or_logical_volume.html

Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial is not yet officially supported by Thinlinc 4.6. However, with just some additional dependencies, it is working.

Additional packages needed:
apt-get install lsb-core python python2 python-gtk2 python-apt

Check if /var/lib/lsb exists. If not, create this directory as root.

Install Thinlinc as usual.

To have MATE as desktop environment available, use the following meta package:
apt-get install mate-desktop

In my scenario, I use a single Master server built from a freshly installed Xenial Desktop (Unity), let Unity greeter still exist and have Mate as additional Desktop to choose. Like this, my VDI is accessible on small bandwith connections and with a Raspberry Pi 2 as Thin Client using RPiTC.