Thin Clients

[Rashkae]

Wade Smart wrote:
> 20081007 1112 GMT-6
> 
> A school system local to me asked about the possibility of moving to 
> linux. Of course I talked that up right away. But then this older bloke 
> asked about setting up Thin Clients at each school and linking the 
> server from each school to the main server. I thought about it (on the 
> spot of course) and while it sounds good in theory, I personally dont 
> know if that would work OR if the overall benefits pan out.
> 

It works really well and the benefits are great.

Now, to run full desktop environments, you will need more than a few
application servers.  If using commodity hardware (as opposed to dual
Xeon with over 20GB of ram), You'll probably only want 10 to 20 clients
per application server.

It becomes impractical to use removable media on the clients, so clients
that need to access removable media might not be appropriate for this setup.

The benefits are being able to use any old computer as a thin
client....even on the desk I type this, I'm running a full Gutsy Gnome
Desktop from my client, which is the oldest pc in the office, a PII 350Mhz

Latency is absolutely not noticeable for regular office applications,
web browsing and audio.  I can even watch small size movies without
issue.  (latency becomes problematic for videos over 500x500, and
obviously, you wouldn't be able to play videos on more than 1 or 2
clients simultaneously)