[Wylug-discuss] Thin Clients

[Phil Foxton]

On Thu, 2007-03-15 at 07:55 +0000, Phil Driscoll wrote:
> 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 have created something like this before, the best starting point would
probably be either LTSP (www.ltsp.org) or, a more education oriented
version of the same, K12tsp (I think).  Just had a look at the ltsp site
(it has been a long time since I looked there) and they have drastically
updated it with success stories, including one for Skegness Grammar
school which might give you some pointers.

FYI the one I set up was to boot clients from the network and launch a
Citrix client, but shouldn't be too hard to launch rdesktop instead.

Let me know if you need any more pointers/ help

Phil
-- 
Phil Foxton <phil at thefoxtons.org.uk>