[Wylug-discuss] Thin Clients

[Phil Driscoll]

On Wednesday 14 March 2007, Rob Hall wrote:
> Hello folks,
>
> I've been asked to look at contributing to a feasibility study for the
> following scenario.
>
> We are looking at the possibility of moving away from desktop machines in
> our computer suites and towards thin clients. The rationale behind this is
> that as money is squeezed from our budgets we need to extend the life
> expectancy of the machines we have in our college. As we have a large
> number of perfectly serviceable machines which are now needing replacement
> we figured we could use them as thin client terminals until they die a
> death. After that we would replace them with something like the JackPC.
>
> Our current situation is a Windows S2k3 environment which we would need to
> put a thin client front-end to for some of our suites (around 120 machines)
> and we are looking at a number of solutions - one of which would be to use
> a Linux based TC server and Client which would RDP into the Windows
> back-end servers.
>
> Has anyone done anything like this before or push me off in the right
> direction. I've done a fair bit of digging and it looks pretty possible
> but, as ever, the devil is in the detail. I'm just vaguely excited that we
> might get the penguin into our server room!!
I've not done the RDP bit, but as long as you can get your old machines to 
boot from the network using pxe or etherboot, then getting them up and 
running as thin clients with LTSP should be failrly straightforward. There 
may be niggles and aggravations to do with getting 'local devices' and sound 
on the terminals working. As you might imagine, plugging a USB memory stick 
into a terminal will not have much effect on the Windows desktop on the 
server which the user is viewing.

If you can convince the powers that be to use the thin clients 
as 'productivity boxes' running e.g. Firefox and OpenOffice under Linux, you 
should be able to solve the above niggles.

Cheers
-- 
Phil Driscoll