[Gllug] Time for new mobo - server for thin clients at home?

[Richard Jones]

On Sat, Apr 08, 2006 at 01:45:37PM +0100, M.Blackmore wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-04-08 at 12:42 +0100, Peter Childs wrote:
> > but if your only talking
> > about a client or two you should not have any problems we have more
> > like 10 clients running 24x7 and no problems.
> 
> Only 4 of us, and the occassional friend or two playing alongside, and
> heaps of P500 level machines with small disks and ca 384-500mb ram. 
> 
> So little load at any one time, just a scattering of terminals between
> his and her study, kids play/sitting room, kitchen diner, and a laptop
> or two in the future (the idea being to find a second hand laptop with
> good screen but limited guts and run that wirelessly). Probably
> something in living room and bedroom as myth TV/radio terminal to ditch
> collection of wearing out video players etc.

LTSP sounds ideal for this ...

Considering not very long ago I was running P500 machines with 512MB
of RAM as webservers on a fairly high traffic site, I don't regard
those as low end in any sense :-) Low end is when you've got some
486's and Pentium 133's you want to reuse.

> The idea is to cut costs and put available resources into one more top
> end box with faster processor and goodly ram.
>
> IF THAT logic holds!
>
> Does it???

Well, only so far.  The problem is that the bits where you ought to be
concentrating your money -- high quality screens, keyboards and mice
-- tend to be the expensive bits.  A low-end Athlon is enough to serve
many users, but it costs a small fraction of a decent monitor, and
you'll need one decent monitor for every terminal.  We looked into
this a couple of years ago when trying to sell a terminal-server-like
solution to a UK school: We were connecting several monitors/keyboards
directly to a single PC, so it wasn't exactly like your configuration,
but it had the same economic drawbacks.

> Main problem is demand for games that run under windows. I don't suppose
> there is any way to export windows from a central server is there to run
> PC games? Or perhaps I'll just have to settle for another capable box
> somewhere as a games platform, but I'm trying to avoid the cost...

My advice is to get a console.  Cheaper and far more reliable, and you
can't play Katamari Damacy on a PC.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com
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