How does ThinLinX licensing work?

TLXOS licenses are perpetual, although historically your ability to upgrade TLXOS used to be time-limited to three years from the date of license activation (the "Support Expiry" date; in practice we never enforced denial of any support other than upgrade rights).  That limitation was removed in TLXOS 4.8.0 / TMS 8.2.0, and won't affect new installations. If you have older TLXOS releases, upgrading their tms_client version to at least 8.2.0, and TMS to at least 8.2.0, will retroactively remove Support Expiry.

Our licenses aren't encrypted keys that you enter, they're entitlements that exist on our Internet license server (tls.thinlinx.com), so the server that TMS runs on needs to have access to https://tls.thinlinx.com to in order to check entitlements and issue encrypted tokens to the TLXOS devices.  If you need to use a web proxy, you can specify this under Tools -> Options if using TMS, or in the Proxies tab if using Tlxconfig.  When viewed in a web browser, the web portal at https://tls.thinlinx.com can only be used to check your current license allocations.

The file that gets installed on your TLXOS device is just an offline proof that a registration for that device exists on our license server.  While the token (/config/etc/tmslic.txt) exists, the device will never need to contact the Internet license server and will continue to operate indefnitely (unless it's a trial license, in which case the device will go into maintenance mode after the 30-day trial expires).  The license token will be preserved when resetting to defaults, but in newer TLXOS releases, will not be preserved over TLXOS upgrades.  Unless you are on a network with no Internet access, you can reinstall the O/S as often as you like without losing your license, because when you install the license a second time, your existing license will just be retrieved from tls.thinlinx.com.

Licenses are hardware-locked, so if you move a storage device from one device to another it will  become unlicensed because the device serial number no longer matches the license token (we would have preferred to use a floating license manager, but this is too difficult to implement ourselves and therefore would have required inclusion of a third-party commercial product, which would have forced us to increase our prices considerably).  If you have a hardware failure/loss, you can use the "Revoke" License Action to free up the entitlement for the failed device (you will not be permitted to run TLXOS on the failed hardware thereafter).

After you install TLXOS, on first boot each device will try to fetch its license automatically, and automatically register a 30-day trial if there isn't one.  On older releases of TLXOS (<= 4.6.1) this will only succeed if the device has direct (unproxied) access to https://tls.thinlinx.com, but devices using tms_client 8.1.0 or later will use TMS to fetch licenses on the device's behalf if direct connection fails.

To install paid licenses (or more accurately, to register a device and/or (re)install proof-of-license), download the TMS management application from https://thinlinx.com/download/thinlinx-usa-mirror-1/ or one of the other mirrors listed at http://thinlinx.com/download/ and use this to install your licenses using the Device -> Update -> Update License option (select License Type = Paid License, License Action = Install, enter your ThinLinX Store credentials for Email and Password).  Alternatively you can use the local configuration tool, Tlxconfig, to do this on each device console (press the Configure button on the post-session dialog window, or use the <Ctrl><Alt>c keyboard shortcut when not in a fullscreen VDI session), but doing this centrally via TMS is a lot more convenient.  You can also do this to manually register a trial license (select Trial License instead) if your device couldn't do it automatically.

If TMS and your devices are on a network with no Internet connection, you can export a client list out of TMS and send it to us, and we can then  perform registrations on your behalf and send you back the encrypted license tokens, which can then be installed on your devices via SCP, but this is a cumbersome process. We'd likewise have to perform license renewals or revocations on your behalf and send you the replacement license tokens.  In future we may make a version of our license server available for offline installation, which you could then point your offline TMS at, but no such product currently exists.