On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 10:06 PM, Mike Miller <mbmiller at taxa.epi.umn.edu> wrote: > On Sat, 12 Jul 2008, Andrew Zbikowski wrote: > >> The clients have to boot up something. >> >> Your clients boot off the network using the ROM from the network card. >> >> The network card downloads a small boot image that is usually the Linux >> kernel, and enough utilities to NFS mount an export from the server. >> This is most likely what the client images are. >> >> The XServer starts, and does an XDMCP query to the server. >> >> The thin client is only the display. Even though the applications are >> running on the server and using the server's CPU and memory, the thin >> client is still doing the graphics processing. You might want something >> a bit faster and a bit more modern than a 386...unless you're doing just >> text console. :) > > > The X terminology is a little tricky because the "X server" is running on > the machine that one would be tempted to call "the client" -- the usually > smaller machine that connects to the larger more powerful machine. So in > the X system the thin client has to do a lot of work. > > Another option is VNC. With VNC the X client and X server both run on the > big server machine and the smaller machine just runs a viewer that does > very little processing. But, for VNC on Linux, the VNCviewer is an X > application which requires that an X server is running on the thin client. > It might work a lot better on a minimal client system though, and it has > some other advantages over XDMCP. > > I don't know how low you can go in processing power and make this work. > A 386 is so old (I think I started buying 486s in 1993) -- is it not > possible to get 486 machines for free that can do this work for you? > Even Pentium II machines are getting pretty long in the tooth and I'm sure > many are being discarded. > > Mike > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > PII's are pretty easy for people to give up for nothing. I offered "free recycling" to folks a few years ago and ended up with a bunch of working PII/PIII's that would make mighty fine thin clients. I would imagine it would be even easier waving a school flag. I'd be happy to throw the word out to some friends, family, clients if you're looking to collect some gear that would be easier to support and more useful to the students. -- Donovan Niesen