[Gllug] X terminal or diskless workstation - views?

[John Winters]

On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 14:26, Peter Childs wrote:
> John Winters wrote:
> 
> >Having got my little Mini-ITX box booting over the LAN I'm torn between
> >two different ways of configuring it - X terminal (logging in to the
> >server) or diskless workstation.  Anyone any views on pros and cons of
> >the two approaches?
> >
> >Can one have sound on an X terminal (driven by apps running on the X
> >client machine)?
> >
> >TIA,
> >John
> >
> >  
> >
> 
>     I'm not too sure at the difference between the two options, they 
> seam the same to me. ie a X terminal would be a diskless workstation,

The difference is that an X terminal is just a terminal; all the apps
run on a different box.  With the diskless workstation approach your
apps run locally (on the same machine as the X server).

Yes, in a sense an X terminal is a kind of diskless workstation, but a
very crippled one.

I suppose the essential difference is that with an X terminal you log
into a remote machine and use your local machine just as an X server. 
With the diskless workstation approach you log into your local machine
and it provides everything (X server and applications) with just filing
services (NFS) provided by the remote machine.

I'm finishing off configuring the box as a diskless workstation, then
I'll do some tests to see which works better.  Obviously, given a fully
configured diskless workstation you can still use it as an X terminal by
invoking a DHCP chooser at the login screen.

>  to 
> do anything your going to need to load stuff off your server, 
> (applications) by loading the apps on the server thouse using shared 
> librarys do not have to load the librarys more than once so you save on 
> memory. If you load the apps locally you have to send the entire apps 
> over the network to load them into the clients memory that can bog down 
> your network. In short its an argument of bogging down your network in 
> traffic and your server in disk transactions and bogging down your 
> server when it has 3 copies of openoffice or the like loaded.

But the server would never have 3 copies of OpenOffice.org loaded. 
That's one of the attractions of the X terminal approach.

>     I asume your using ltsp (or www.ltsp.org)

No, just straight Debian Sarge.  It's not particularly complex to set
up.

John

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