Ubuntu SMB migration

[Franz Waldmüller]

madanabhat27 at gmail.com schrieb:
> Hi folks !
> Our company is planning to migrate four of our PC's from an MS Windows 98/ XP/Vista environment to an Ubuntu 8.10/9.04 Environment and they have chosen me to coordinate and manage the migration and we 8-10 Personal Computers. The following are the configs of the four of them 
> PC # 1 
> Intel Pentium III 120MB SDRAM 40GB HDD, CD/DVD writer, MS Windows XP Home 
> PC # 2
> AMD Sempron, 128MB DDR2 RAM, 40GB HDD, CD writer/DVD ROM, MS Windows XP 
> PC # 3 
> Intel Pentium II ( Planning to upgrade to PIII ( if it is possible )  ) 64MB SDRAM ( Planning to upgrade to 256MB SDRAM  ) 24GB HDD, CD ROM, MS Windows 98 
> PC # 4 
> Intel Core2Duo 1.66 GHz, 2GB DDR2 RAM 160GB HDD, DVD/CD RW  MS Windows Vista Business, Intel Pro/Wireless 3945 A/B/G 
> and I'd like to know, 

As others have mentioned already: your hardware is quite old. 
Nevertheless your needs seam to be low, a thin client solution could fit 
your case:

Investing in a thin client server and use the old ones as clients. You 
could test this setup without buying new hardware:
Use the Core2Duo machine as the server -> try a dual boot configuration 
with the existing vista installation.

The clients need network cards which can boot from the network. The 
implantation should not be too difficult. But it should not be your 
first contact with GNU/Linux.

Of course for a productive environment I would by a new thin client 
server. A fast dual core with 4 GB of RAM should be capable of serving 
your clients. But don't count me on that (I might be corrected by 
somebody who is more up date with hardware requirements).
If you want reliability invest in at least 3 hard disks which use in a 
RAID 5 configuration.
This server should be available at ~450EUR (including 3 hard disks).

I am using an old 800Mhz Pentium with 384MB RAM to log with XDMCP into a 
Pentium 4 machine. Then I am working on both machines on the 
simultaneously. This works quite well.

I expect that you want to use the same software on all machines so the 
use of lite distributions such as "damn small linux" or "puppy linux" 
does not seam to be a good option.


http://doc.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/edubuntu/handbook/C/server-hw.html

I wish you luck.
Franz