[Gllug] Multiple X servers

[John Hearns]

On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 09:26, Alain Williams wrote:
>
> 
> That is exactly why I bought a couple of 'spare' video cards a couple of
> weeks ago. Most PCs spend most of their time doing zilch, and word
> processing, reading mail, ... are not CPU hogs.
Agreed.
> So invest in a reasonable
> amount of RAM (not much of an investment these days) so that the thing
> won't swap & I think that you should be able to run several users off
> one box.
Agreed - decent amount of RAM a good thing.

But may I (politely) be allowed to think a bit further?
Your idea is excellent - and fun.
How about building the box and bringing it along to GLLUG?
We will all learn something!

But for a real classroom etc. you are building in one point of failure.
Go with the economics you have - but think of thin clients?
You have only one central box to administer.
But if there are hardware failures of the clients then (hopefully) you
have another spare ready to swing in.

Please open the debate - I know that the thin client model has failed
time and time again and I've always wondered really why.

Also I agree that the economics of the thin-client setup don't scale
quite so well.
Say we take a second-hand base workstation at £150 per user.
Add your figures of £100 for KVM, that makes £250 per user.
However, my argument is that support costs matter too, and thin client
network.

Oops, I suppose I ought to be honest and add in hub (£100) and cabling.
Assume the clients have NICs on board.


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