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I find many aspects of smart phones compelling, with one exception: the cost of the phones, which typically exceeds that of a traditional box. I understand all of the benefits of smart phones (and the downsides, thanks) but I'm very hung up on spending more for less.

You have to pay more to fit all that technology into a smaller package! If you don't care about space, just run a virtualized desktop on traditional desktop hardware.

BTW I would recommend diskless workstations for thin clients. They may not be the cheapest, but they are full featured, fairly affordable, and well supported.

In the converted lab have a CD burner station available that students can burn LiveCDs. Many universities have Linux distribution mirrors already set up so it would just be a matter of locating the directory - so no 'download' necessary for the lab.

There is an LTSP user group on IRC (irc.freenode.com #ltsp) as well as the documentation to set it up in the Ubuntu.com site. It's only about five commands to get it running after base OS is installed. Later, IT people just need to upgrade the server and all clients are 'fixed' at once, no running around to 30+ workstations for separate independent installs.

LTSP is very easy - I use it in my home network (11 or 12 year old pc's stripped of all drives that have PXE bootable Ethernet cards). Plus I've set up a small manufacturing business with discarded hardware (biggest expense was running Ethernet cables). You'll only need around a 1Ghz or faster if available server and up to 30 client machines (new thin clients or free converted fat clients). For test purposes, you could use floppy disk images from rom-o-matic (.com or .net?) that will force PXE booting off the server and then they can be popped out and the client computers boot back into their normal 'fat' routines. Some labs do this at night for 'folding at home'-type of cluster computing activities.

For your coursework, you might work out something with Cannonical (www.canonical.com) to ship a box of LiveCDs to the bookstore that become 'mandatory' courseware like the student buys books - and the LiveCD is "$5" or something nominal and they are all set. They can run it Live or do an installation.

Go to this site: http://www.disklessworkstations.com/ They offer a new $110 thin client that works with LTSP. This company is active on the #ltsp channel and can help walk through initial setup.

LTSP website

Certified clients and other hardware/support

It's worked so well, that we've decided not to buy any more PCs, only diskless workstations. We've also changed the low-end PCs into diskless workstations as well.

We still have a WinNT PDC, so I can't answer about AD. We have a SQL Server 7 database server, which supports a mission critical app written in Visual Basic. I can't get rid of that.

But we have stopped writing reports and programs for the Windows environment a long time ago. We develop everything now for the web, using PHP/FreeTDS to query the database server.

End result. The business has benefited. Once you write an app for the web, it's instantly installed. There is no need to go around to each workstation to install anything. You just send out an email with the URL to the new app or report. Instant upgrade.

We have only 2 people in our IT dept. The other guy uses W2K as his desktop most of the time. I use only Slackware. If I have to do something in Windows, I'll rdesktop to a server to do it.

So yes, it's all possible. Is it good for the business? Yes. My boss is happy. He likes the idea of spending less on IT using open source.

There are probably much more complex scenarios than the one we have to deal with. But Linux + the web are making the desktop obsolete anyhow.

I think this is why Microsoft is concentrating so much on the gaming platform. They know the desktop is doomed. If you can get from the web what you used to get from the desktop, all you need is a light desktop.

This is why the server is so much more important than the desktop. And Linux excels on the server. So I'd go with the idea "convert the server first, the desktop will follow".

This makes the assumption that school districts use hardware that can network boot. I've run into this problem many times.

Bootable NICs can be had for 20 USD or less. And if you can't spring for those, you can still do etherboot from a floppy, a CD, or an old hard drive.

Plus, as cool as terminal clients are, it is hard to muster up the hardware to support the server side. Remember your budget is often somewhere close or below 0.

I'm not following you here.
Of course you need to spend some money for hardware if you are building a lab from scratch. You would be spending a heck of a lot more on a bunch of windows PCs than you would one decent server. Not to mention the fact that it would be crazy to put together even a windows network without a server to at least authenticate to.

LTSP is the way to go here.
Check out the latest ubuntu, or K12LTSP

Just spend 1K on a decent server and use the junk machines as terminals. You could use old hard drives to boot from or buy 20 dollar bootable nics from here

I've got a school running 50 terminals and the minimal maintenance on the terminals is really nice.

and they aren't cheaper if you're buying new hardware.

Here's a brand new and cheap fanless thin client
I've also bought a few of these and have been very happy with them.

And buying from this vendor directly supports the development of LTSP.

and they aren't cheaper if you're buying new hardware.

Here's a brand new and cheap fanless thin client
I've also bought a few of these and have been very happy with them.

And buying from this vendor directly supports the development of LTSP.

While not as nice as real thin clients, old junk machines can easily be made to be reliable with an LTSP network.

You can get a good bootable NIC for 20 bucks, remove local devices (hard drive, floppy, cdrom) and you have a pretty reliable machine.
Sure the CPU fan or the power supply can go out on your dumpster pentium 166s, but its not like you can't just take the NIC and put it in another junk machine.

I've outfitted a school with 60 workstations that my company has thrown away. Pentium 133s - P2 350s.

LTSP, specifically K12LTSP has been the perfect solution.
Save your money for network infrastructure, flat panel screens, and internet :)

I can vouch for this as well. LTSP is an amazing project.

K12LTSP is a nice fedora3 based distro with all the LTSP setup built in as well as a bundle of educational software.

I have built a lab for my kid's school with 60 machines connected to a dual xeon server. Most old junk hardware works fine as a thin client.

We saved so much money not upgrading the client machines(hardware or MS software) in the first year that we upgraded to flat panels. And we are in the process of buying some small fanless thin clients as well.

lots of help available in #ltsp & #k12ltsp on freenode and on the k12 mailing list.
And if you want to support this project, buy hardware from http://www.disklessworkstations.com it is where the primary devleopment comes from.

I'm in the process of building my own "ultimate workshop" and I've already got the computing side set up. I'm using a disk-less workstation connected to a cheap 14" monitor. That monitor is also connected to a DirecTV box via a video to VGA box I got from a discount place for about $40. Added an old set of computer speakers, and I have a set up where I can watch TV (discovery channel in the background usually), listen to music (via DirectTV's music channels) or use the computer (X terminal into my home server). I tied all of this into one little box that I have a fan sucking air into through a filter. The box where I have this is is made positive pressure by the fan, keeping most of the dust out. I sealed it with a piece of plexiglass with magnetic tape around the edges. Of course, my workshop is already wired with Ethernet- as yours should be!

For the keyboard, I couldn't anything I really liked that was sealed (though I'm still looking), so I bought a $10 keyboard at Fry's- I figure I'll just replace it as needed. I'm using an optical mouse- less likely to get gunked up by the gunk on the workbench.

I tried to make sure that mothing I installed had any internal fans- those are the things most likely to get gunked up with dust first.

Of course, once things do get dusty, I have shop-air to blow them out (air-compressor outside, copper piping inside). Watch out- you can generate a lot of static electricity with compressed air- which is why I'll be grounding all the copper piping in my system (which should reduce it somewhat). Blowing out electronics systems is probably not the best idea, since there is usually some water in the compressed air- I've built in a condenser type system to try to get rid of some of the water, but it's not really perfect.

This is a project in continual change (as all proper geek type projects should be)- I'm trying to make it just as I like, but with the ability to change in case I want/need to reconfigure.

If you are just going to be using the machine as a thin client, why not just get a diskless workstation? I've maintained a dozen of these at work for a few years. We use them as web terminals, but they could certainly do more (such as VNC if that's what you want).

To see how this would work, take a machine with two nics in your house and install K12LTSP. Now, take another old machine, Pentium 90 is fine, slap a 8139 nic in it and plug it into the k12ltsp server. Create a boot floppy, put it in the pentium 90, and turn it on. Low and behold KDE in all its glory! On a 100Mbit connection it should feel like you're sitting at the server... (Simplified, but shouldn't take a SlashDot reader too long to set up. The newest Knoppix CD let's you do this also, just two machines and two CDs.)

Now imagine the ISP running LTSP, and they just give out diskless workstations to new subscribers, much like cell phones, no additional charge for the hardware. Users don't have to worry about managing anything with their computer. For local storage they use USB flash drives. Their camera still uploads their pictures, they can still use a local printer, etc.

Will this replace my computer? No, I would need more than this provides. Would this replace the computer for a lot of my family members? Yes.

1) Video playback doesn't work well over the network... I would know, I do it regularly.

2) Diskless terminals aren't terribly easy to setup and administer (you need static DHCP/arpd, EPROMs on each NIC, etc). Nor are they free.

The machines can be Pentium-class, with 32-64mb of RAM. Stuff from the corporate trash heap does just fine. (Or, buy new for under $300)

Anyway, once the server is set up there is no additional configuration needed for each client..

If, for example, you need to set a up a dozen machines for web browsing in a library or school, LTSP is great..

I'm the systems administrator for a university library. To provide computing for our patrons we use a mixture of Dells running Windows 2000, iMacs with OS X, and Linux machines running LTSP.

Windows can be made very secure, but it takes a lot of time to learn how to set it up properly. Over time i've accumulated lots of small utilities to aid in the task, as well as written several scripts of my own. Besides locking the system down as much as possible, i have a script that runs weekly which uses Norton Ghost to re-image the hard drive.

Macs can also be made very secure. Again, over time i've written scripts to do much of the work on new installs. Here's some URLs to get you started: macosxlabs macosxhints bombich Finally, there is Linux. These are my favorite machines because the administration time required is almost 0. We are running Linux Terminal Server Project with hardware purchased from DisklessWorkstations.com. The machines do not have write access to the server that they boot from, so nothing can get screwed up. If anything happens to a machine, we just have to reset it and a minute later it is back to normal. Setting up the first terminal took some work because i was not familiar with network booting or running an operating system from read-only media (a read-only nfs share in this case), but once the first one is set up, adding additional units is trivial. In our setup the applications actually run on the diskless station, but it is more common to run applications on the server and have them display on the diskless station. If you wanted to go that route, you'd want to spend some money on a nice server, but it should work well. I've actually been thinking of buying a better server and trying to run applications on it and eventually trying to move all computing to Linux.

Or you could load freedos onto a small partition on the hard drive, and an etherboot com image in the autoexe.bat.
That way you could still used the floppy & cdrom of the thin client.
Of course you could just run linux and do an X:query, but then you lose the sound support and other cool local device support stuff that the ltsp.org guys are doing.
If the client is really strapped for ram, you could use that HD for a linux swap file as well. Just remeber that its just running a small kernel for X, it doesn't need the ram of a full workstation.

Or better yet, go to Disklessworkstations.com and buy some bootable NICs.

Or even better than that, buy some acutal thin clients from them.

There is no justification for ever installing full-blown PCs in this kind of environment. (No, I don't work for or with these guys, I just have way more experience than I ever wanted administering extensive networks of independent PCs in environments where the cumulative equivalent of VT's Big Mac was brought to bear on tasks that cumulatively required roughly a dual P4). Web browsing, word processing and the like require almost no processing power. Unless your users are creating/editing/transcoding audio or video, compiling elaborate programs, or doing deep data searches on local data, the computing power is wasted.

Not to mention the time wasted on cleaning up after clueless users (in a properly configured thin client environment users are only users, not manipulators, of the core operating environment), keeping up with the latest patches, x number of software/OS "up"grades instead of one (and the requisite hardware upgrades - two, three years down the road, instead of replacing a library full of obsolete machines, you replace one, and keep your clients),... I could go on, but /. comments aren't supposed to be books, so I'll stop.

It wasn't long ago that 1GHz was the magic number that both Intel and AMD were trying to hit. (AMD won).
The performance of a 1GHz Athlon is plenty for a home server, and probably just fine for 90% of desktop PC users. My stepfather noticed zero difference moving from an Athlon 800 T-bird to an Athlon 1600+ Palomino, but it would be very noticeable for many people to not have the noise of a CPU cooling fan. Passively cooling a 6W processor would be a breeze (no pun intended).
As an added bonus, the extremely low power usage and low heat output (thus lower air conditioning bills) would allow the chip to eventually pay for itself. I do hope that these chips are eventually made available through normal retail channels such as Newegg.com, since Transmeta products have certainly not been a choice outside of small laptops and diskless X terminals.

Also, this place has headless units for $350, and they are ready to run as LTSP clients.

Even then, you can get older PII class systems used for less than $50 USD, which would run just fine as X terms, with a decent monitor and GFX card.

Until someone makes it, and sells it for that price, the $199 is a hit for a functional PC for under $200 (functional != fast)...

I'm just thinking Xterminal anyway... And this thing is cheaper than Diskless Workstations that the LTSP guys use.

The NIC, which AC told me about, is currently the best box of this kind to my knowledge. I would prefer, however, if it had no CD/modem/flashdisk and was cheaper without any stuff I don't need. I would love to see a box which is able to act as an X terminal, booting from network, without any moving parts, for something like $100. If the NIC cos ts $200 with all of the features, it would be possible to build a stripped version for $100.

I generally nead exactly TCSX-1, but four times cheaper... If only there was a TCSX-1 priced as optimally as the NIC, it would cost below $100... Oh, well... I'll try to find out where and for how much I can buy parts which they use. If anyone has any experience with buying and using such integrated board, similar to this board (I don't know what exactly it is, they only say in the spec what it has, not what model it is), please let me know. Thanks.

Another related topics,
What are the cheapest stand-alone:

• x86 processors (50+ MHz)
• mainboards
• ethernet adapters (100 Mb/s)
• VGAs (1+ MB)
• sound cards

It's very hard to find a low-end PC parts today, they don't sell processors with clock rates not measured in GHz in computer stores, you know...

After a quick Google search, I see there are lots of different single board PCs. I'll try to read about them and post the most interesting suff. If you know any of these boards, especially if you have used one of them with Linux Terminal Server or something similar (generally the most important is if you can run Linux on them without any problems) then please post it here. Btw, are there any cases available for them?

The NIC, which AC told me about, is currently the best box of this kind to my knowledge. I would prefer, however, if it had no CD/modem/flashdisk and was cheaper without any stuff I don't need. I would love to see a box which is able to act as an X terminal, booting from network, without any moving parts, for something like $100. If the NIC cos ts $200 with all of the features, it would be possible to build a stripped version for $100.

I generally nead exactly TCSX-1, but four times cheaper... If only there was a TCSX-1 priced as optimally as the NIC, it would cost below $100... Oh, well... I'll try to find out where and for how much I can buy parts which they use. If anyone has any experience with buying and using such integrated board, similar to this board (I don't know what exactly it is, they only say in the spec what it has, not what model it is), please let me know. Thanks.

Another related topics,
What are the cheapest stand-alone:

• x86 processors (50+ MHz)
• mainboards
• ethernet adapters (100 Mb/s)
• VGAs (1+ MB)
• sound cards

It's very hard to find a low-end PC parts today, they don't sell processors with clock rates not measured in GHz in computer stores, you know...

After a quick Google search, I see there are lots of different single board PCs. I'll try to read about them and post the most interesting suff. If you know any of these boards, especially if you have used one of them with Linux Terminal Server or something similar (generally the most important is if you can run Linux on them without any problems) then please post it here. Btw, are there any cases available for them?

The NIC, which AC told me about, is currently the best box of this kind to my knowledge. I would prefer, however, if it had no CD/modem/flashdisk and was cheaper without any stuff I don't need. I would love to see a box which is able to act as an X terminal, booting from network, without any moving parts, for something like $100. If the NIC cos ts $200 with all of the features, it would be possible to build a stripped version for $100.

I generally nead exactly TCSX-1, but four times cheaper... If only there was a TCSX-1 priced as optimally as the NIC, it would cost below $100... Oh, well... I'll try to find out where and for how much I can buy parts which they use. If anyone has any experience with buying and using such integrated board, similar to this board (I don't know what exactly it is, they only say in the spec what it has, not what model it is), please let me know. Thanks.

Another related topics,
What are the cheapest stand-alone:

• x86 processors (50+ MHz)
• mainboards
• ethernet adapters (100 Mb/s)
• VGAs (1+ MB)
• sound cards

It's very hard to find a low-end PC parts today, they don't sell processors with clock rates not measured in GHz in computer stores, you know...

After a quick Google search, I see there are lots of different single board PCs. I'll try to read about them and post the most interesting suff. If you know any of these boards, especially if you have used one of them with Linux Terminal Server or something similar (generally the most important is if you can run Linux on them without any problems) then please post it here. Btw, are there any cases available for them?

TCSX-1 is the cheapest what I've found, but still $400 for 66MHz x86 with 16MB RAM is just too much. For that money I can buy a terminal server for them.

On the other hand, few weeks ago I bought an old Fujitsu ErgoPro X PC with Pentium 133MHz, 32MB RAM, PS/2 keyboard & mouse ports, 2MB SVGA, floppy drive and 100Mb/s network adapter, all for $25. It's a great machine, but I need something smaller.

Do you know where to find something smaller than that Fujitsu (a compact horizontal desktop case) but cheaper than that TCSX-1? Maybe building it from parts is the way to go?