[ubuntu-za] Thin Client on Ubuntu 8.04

[Jonathan Carter (highvoltage)]

Hi Barry

Barry Wyatt wrote:
> The big question - what version of Ubuntu were you running in your thin
> client application?

Edubuntu with LTSP. At the very minimum we used Pentium II machines. 
Later on Pentium III's and 4's.

> I am a total beginner at Linux/Ubuntu and am beginning to think the Thin
> Client project was a little ambitious to start with.

 From what it sounds like, you did everything right, your clients even 
booted, it's probably just a matter of some old hardware.

> One of my machines is a 6x86L-PR200+  150 MHz  65536K memory   
> Bios 1984-96
> (Way older than five years :-)

Yes, the RAM is enough. The CPU should do ok too. The problem is 
probably with the board itself. Many distributions have in recent years 
dropped support for things like the ISA bus, which most P1 boards still 
used. If it's using an integrated ISA sound card- or perhaps even a 
critical device for the system, then it wouldn't work.

> Seeing that the machines are older than five years is there another
> solution to get these to run a reasonable version of Edubuntu?  This is
> the kind of machine that is "freely" available.  If I could buy multiple
> units of modern hardware I would not have to go thin client.

Where are you based? How many machines do you need? Often, you can get 
plenty of old machines that would work fine as thin clients just for the 
price it takes to physically collect them. It might be a better choice 
getting slightly newer machines from a support perspective as well. 
Machines that are past their end of life often cause more problems than 
they're worth. You'll find that with an old P1 system like that, you'll 
also run into problems where some of them will have display cards with 
too little memory to display proper resolutions, and there was a time in 
the late 90's where there were many, many different weird display chips 
around that will work with nothing anymore.

Hope that helps.

-Jonathan