[Ubuntu-PH] Fwd: commenting about thin clients

["Yosif ali" Roque Morales]

Hi freinds, Does ubuntu have a solution to thin clinets and does somebody in
the group understand how this goes in Ubuntu?Can anyone comment and react on
this:

Thanks.


Thin clients provide an incredible number of advantages over traditional
PCs:

   - They consume very little power
   - They are generally silent
   - They are easy to secure
   - They have little value alone, so tend not to be stolen
   - Central management of the server saves a lot of time in client
   management
   - They tend to be less expensive than regular PCs
   - Linux and Windows solutions, including virtualized desktops, are mature
   and plentiful

Frankly, they're just plain easy for even a single IT person to manage;
software gets installed in one place, patches are applied to one computer,
anti-malware is managed at a single point, etc.

So since they're apparently the best things since sliced bread, why am I
considering another computing model as I look at deployments around the
district and the next refresh at the high school (about a year away)? A
couple of reasons. Thin clients represent a single point of failure: if the
server goes down or loses connectivity, entire labs go down. Streaming video
and audio can also be problematic, since the server generally have only one
or two connections to the Internet and internal network; 20 student pulling
multimedia content on what amounts to a single computer from the web can
strain bandwidth pretty quickly.

They also don't allow for the sort of collaboration that I'd like to see
among students. Although thin client laptops exist, they are quite
expensive<http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06b/321957-321957-64295-321838-3660143-3660785-3660787-3672816.html>,
meaning that students are confined to a lab setting when using thin clients.
They sit next to each other, usually in rows so that they can all see the
instructor and will occasionally pull chairs closer together to look at the
same screen for small group work.

Regular readers will know that I'm on quite a netbook kick lately. While I'm
not suggesting that they represent a solution to every IT problem faced by
schools, I have to wonder if a deployment of netbooks might not make more
sense than a full thin client solution. They certainly address the single
point of failure and collaboration issues. As we move students further into
the cloud, as well, the need to access standard Office productivity suites
diminishes.

Management obviously becomes more time consuming, although well-configured
Linux distributions should be relatively robust. In fact, netbooks could
lend themselves to a hybrid approach: use the netbooks for daily computing
and a less expensive terminal server (accessed from the netbooks) for a
select group of applications to be managed centrally (Geometer's Sketchpad,
for example).

I'm certainly nowhere close to making a decision on this; I have plenty of
time. However, netbooks seem to represent a nice alternative to expensive
mobile thin clients and seem to address some of the deficiencies in the thin
client computing model. They definitely warrant consideration, particularly
as their prices continue to fall.


-- 
Yosif Roque Santos Morales
====================
School Administrator
Asian Academy of Business and Computers
Professor, Sociology, Strategic Studies and Islamology
Ubuntulinux user
Linux machine # 365046.
http://lamundofloss.blogspot.com/
http://mafatihulhikmah.blogspot.com/
http://strategicresearchinstitute.blogspot.com/
Mobile number +639275642816



-- 
Yosif Roque Santos Morales
====================
School Administrator
Asian Academy of Business and Computers
Professor, Sociology, Strategic Studies and Islamology
Ubuntulinux user
Linux machine # 365046.
http://lamundofloss.blogspot.com/
http://mafatihulhikmah.blogspot.com/
http://strategicresearchinstitute.blogspot.com/
Mobile number +639275642816
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