Thin-client? info

[Matt Morgan]

On 9/3/07, SteVe Cook <yorvik.ubunto at googlemail.com> wrote:
> A friend ha just acquired two old machines from work.  One 850MHz, one
> 450MHz.  We've run a live CD on both and everything works. As he prefers
> Kubuntu they're a bit sluggish so we thought of using both machines
> together, with one as a terminal and the other a server.  We read a bit
> of info on the net and they always recommend a powerful machine as the
> server, but this is with multiple terminals.  As this is just going to
> be the one terminal I thought we should use the most powerful machine
> fir that as the graphics would be the most CPU intensive.  It has an old
> matronix video card with out direct rendering.
> Anybody else set up any thing like this or have any thoughts before we
> start the very slow installation process.

I've done some thin-client stuff. I don't think this is really worth
your time for a speed boost. But you may learn a lot in the process,
so maybe it's worth it for that reason.

The simplest way to do it is just with XDMCP. The second simplest, I
don't know, maybe K12LTSP.

You didn't say how much RAM either has, but that's pretty important,
too. If you want to speed these things up without spending a lot of
money, more RAM (depending on what they have now) may help.

I understand you just said your friend prefers Kubuntu, but you'll get
a lot more speed improvement from switching to a light desktop like
XFCE than by trying to turn two slow computers into one faster one.
FYI, I have XFCE & Ubuntu running on a 300 MHz Pentium II subnotebook
with 192Mb RAM and it's bearable, after the super-slow boot.

--Matt