Slashdot Mirror

These machines (from Windows 95 era) are far too weak to run decent desktop Linux. In fact they will run windowing system and graphical mode fine, but when it comes down to applications it will be *VERY* painly to run Firefox or OpenOffice.org on them.

Instead you can turn the old machines into thin clients. So they will serve only as an display and input to applications that will be run on more powerfull server. You need to set up a fairly capable server (the ammount of RAM matters) - dual P3 with 1GB RAM and decent big disks will do for a handful of clients. The clients can boot of minidistribution installed on them locally, from live CD or via network (netboot). Network option will be probably best but not all systems (meaning PCs) will support it.

This way all the old machines will do is connect to that server and display appliations run on the server. When one such thin client breaks (the old machines *WILL* break often) you just replace it with another one and it is basically it. Also management of such system is much simpler than managing network of Windows 95 - all apps and all user data is on the server, so you have only one place to look after, only one place to manage software, only one place to backup etc.

There are various Linux distributions build for education. F.e. I would take Edubuntu for a spin (for starters):
http://www.edubuntu.org/
http://www.edubuntu.org/Screenshots (these speak for themselves)

Thera are also few ways for managing terminal server/client network, one most well known solution is the Linux Terminal Server Project - have a look at their documentation, it is fairly complete:
http://www.ltsp.org/
http://www.ltsp.org/documentation/index.php

Also if you are looking for help seek your local Linux community. Linux servers are extremely easy to manage remotely so you can probably find some kind admins/gurus that will want to help you pro bono.

Good Luck. :)

These machines (from Windows 95 era) are far too weak to run decent desktop Linux. In fact they will run windowing system and graphical mode fine, but when it comes down to applications it will be *VERY* painly to run Firefox or OpenOffice.org on them.

Instead you can turn the old machines into thin clients. So they will serve only as an display and input to applications that will be run on more powerfull server. You need to set up a fairly capable server (the ammount of RAM matters) - dual P3 with 1GB RAM and decent big disks will do for a handful of clients. The clients can boot of minidistribution installed on them locally, from live CD or via network (netboot). Network option will be probably best but not all systems (meaning PCs) will support it.

This way all the old machines will do is connect to that server and display appliations run on the server. When one such thin client breaks (the old machines *WILL* break often) you just replace it with another one and it is basically it. Also management of such system is much simpler than managing network of Windows 95 - all apps and all user data is on the server, so you have only one place to look after, only one place to manage software, only one place to backup etc.

There are various Linux distributions build for education. F.e. I would take Edubuntu for a spin (for starters):
http://www.edubuntu.org/
http://www.edubuntu.org/Screenshots (these speak for themselves)

Thera are also few ways for managing terminal server/client network, one most well known solution is the Linux Terminal Server Project - have a look at their documentation, it is fairly complete:
http://www.ltsp.org/
http://www.ltsp.org/documentation/index.php

Also if you are looking for help seek your local Linux community. Linux servers are extremely easy to manage remotely so you can probably find some kind admins/gurus that will want to help you pro bono.

Good Luck. :)

I'd check out the Linux Terminal Server Project

Many single board computers also have ruggedized models which can operate in a wider range of temperatures. Often the ruggedized models can operate in from -40 C to +85 C or at least -25 C to +50 C. So use those. Most come with something useful like linux or QNX pre-installed. Many are designed for what you are describing and have many data ports.

You don't say in detail what types of data they will be collecting. But I'd try to keep as much equipment, especially power supplies, out of the chilled area as possible and have each unit run as many sensors as possible. The servers and workstations should definitely be out of the chilled area or at least in their own insulated locker. Going a step further, try thin clients if you need terminals in the cold area. No sense in adding extra heat where it's not wanted or needed.

For my first diskless cluster, I used the warewulf cluster solution to see one up and running. Then, I wiped the master node's disk and built one with the openmosix kernel patch etc, and used the Linux terminal services project which was really cool. the ltsp stuff made the node filesystem stuff easy to build onto. I am waiting for the openmosix team to finish up work and release the userland tools for the 2.6 kernel for my next build. here is a good how-to on LTSP+Openmosix - http://ltsp.org/contrib/ltsp-om5r3c.html

Once you get that going, you might look at PVFS2 Parallel Virtual File System. "PVFS2 stripes file data across multiple disks in different nodes in a cluster. By spreading out file data in this manner, larger files can be created, potential bandwidth is increased, and network bottlenecks are minimized."

Good Luck!!

For my first diskless cluster, I used the warewulf cluster solution to see one up and running. Then, I wiped the master node's disk and built one with the openmosix kernel patch etc, and used the Linux terminal services project which was really cool. the ltsp stuff made the node filesystem stuff easy to build onto. I am waiting for the openmosix team to finish up work and release the userland tools for the 2.6 kernel for my next build. here is a good how-to on LTSP+Openmosix - http://ltsp.org/contrib/ltsp-om5r3c.html

Once you get that going, you might look at PVFS2 Parallel Virtual File System. "PVFS2 stripes file data across multiple disks in different nodes in a cluster. By spreading out file data in this manner, larger files can be created, potential bandwidth is increased, and network bottlenecks are minimized."

Good Luck!!

Also consider scenario 4. http://www.ltsp.org/

Small business owner buys one new server and runs a modern OS on his existing hardware.

Though I've read up on the subject, as far as anecdotal support goes I've only seen a small number of thin client sites in recent years. However, of the thin client sites I've seen, I have to say that the ones running LTSP or a variant, have been really pleasant to use and the ones running (or more correctly trying to run) Windows-based thin clients have been poor to unusable.

A third option to consider would be to buy extra screens, mice and keyboards and go multi-headed aka "multi-seat". It'll more than do for stations where students are just using the web (to include mail) or working on papers, spreadsheets, or presentations.

I've been using LTSP to serve thin clients at a call center for almost six months now (Linux, not Windows, though), and I can honestly say that all the problems I anticipated never materialized. In fact, the biggest issue has been callers sticking gum in my CD drives.

Setting up LTSP is a snap, thanks to the great wiki at http://wiki.ltsp.org/ and the very helpful people on the mailing list.

The *really* hard part is just getting through your brain how exactly thin clients boot off the network, and establish a connection to X remotely. Once that starts to make sense, you really can get it working quickly and easily. There are just so many variables to start off with (NFS, X, XDMCP, PXE, DHCP, TFTP, Etherboot) at the beginning that there's a real learning curve. Once it's working though, it Just Works(tm). It's great.

Just setup a decent firewall to block outgoing stuff to where you don't want them to go, and make sure you give the clients lots of options when it comes to software. Working in a call center can't be the highlight of anybody's life, so I made sure to give them their choice of 4 window managers (GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Flux) and I put all the little games on there to keep them happy in their downtime.

The problems I worried about the most never materialized -- there's no process load, the connection is really fast never laggy (even with 35+ users connected all at once), and everyone picked up really quickly how to switch their preferences around, log in, and get their work done. I never should have put it off as long as I did. It's so much easier than having 40 separate windows installs to worry about and reflash / reinstall / reconfigure when one gets any kind of problems.

And last of all, with LTSP you can throw *any* kind of cheap hardware in the mix, and they all run equally fast. I had a few Pentium 100s on the network for a while, and you couldn't tell any difference in performance compared to the Athlon XPs.

Yeah, its called Microsoft Terminal Services (or Citrix if you need more features). Sun also tried pusing thin desktops years ago. Or you can try http://ltsp.org/ if you are into Linux. Heck, even just setting up roaming desktops and storing all user home directories (and documents) on the server should solve most of the thick client management headaches.

There are any number of better ways to do this than using a web browser.

-matthew

The above setup may not be really suitable for full screen 30fps multimedia movies ( I have experimented with VLC viewer running as a local application on PII 400 LTSP stations -- works very well ) but thats not what it's primary role.

Although they have chosen to deploy Linux using the traditional thick desktop/workstation model, they use a spare server that operates as an X11 application server. This is used on a regular basis by the helpdesk, IT support and a few Windows users that access both windows and remote X Linux. The rescue partition, that can be also network booted via PXE, is based on the Linux Terminal Server Project ( http://www.ltsp.org/ ). During an install or if a security violation is detected, the user of the desktop is booted into Linux thin client, and can access all their files though the Application server. Forensic examination, repairs and installs can take place in the background while the person uses the thin client.

4) Install a DHCP demon on the local server to allocate local IP addresses, DNS and gateway settings. If the desktops are network boot capable then install TFTP to remotely boot and use Knoppix via PXE and the network. If the desktop OS is constantly crashing, or is infected by malware, the user can select PXE/network boot via the BIOS, and boot into Knoppix. The user can then be instructed over the phone to enable the ssh server to allow remote scan,repair and reimaging of the desktop partitions. The user can use the Knoppix desktop to continue working with full access to files while the the remote administrator fixes/reimages the drive in the background.( Consider hiring someone who knows how to customise Knoppix or another live Linux system for your setup )

My dad is the tech admin for a small sized school district and I've helped him set up a Linux Terminal Server Project system for the libraries in the high school and elementary school. Once its up and running it works really well. The best thing is that you can lose the hard drives in the clients, and manage everyhting from one point. Only problem is that you need a mildly decent server. I believe this project is now compatible with Edubuntu, but we used Fedora.

This sounds like a job for Linux Terminal Server

http://www.k12ltsp.org/

http://www.ltsp.org/

I actually run this at home, and am writing this post from a VNC enabled Linux Terminal Server. The machines you are using sound old, so if you are willing to invest a little in server hardware, this could be a good option. If you have PXE boot capable network cards, then you can boot from the network into linux. If not then it can also be accomplished with boot disks. For the must have Windows software packages, you can use rdesktop http://www.rdesktop.org/ and setup a windows terminal server. This can get costly, but it works.

The downside to this setup is sound support. Another package out there that is supposedly quite good is no machine http://www.nomachine.com/

I have never used No Machine, but supposedly it is fast, supports sound, and Educational institutions get a 50% discount on the cost.

If you have any spare hardware kicking around, I would setup a Linux Terminal server and see how you like it. All it would take is one spare workstation that you can wipe and set up with linux. You could then easily enable all of your current machines to boot to the terminal server from floppy, and give it a trial. If it looks like it would fit the bill, then get a real server for it so you don't suffer from speed issues.

Cheers,

CB

http://ltsp.org/

very simple, very straightforward. it's set up to be useable by non-totally-technical administrators, with a looovely simple front-end for setting up DNS, DHCP, adding packages for use on the LTSP-clients (which includes rdesktop).

You can add LTSP to ANY "desktoppy-servery" machine and it will be useable by dozens of simultaneous clients.
So, you pick your distro (deadrat, debian, debian-edu, edubuntu) and then you just follow the LTSP instructions
and voila, its desktop environment is magically available across all the LTSP thin clients.

An AMD64 machine with 1Gb RAM would simultaneously serve 10 students.
A Dual XEON with 4gb of RAM would simultaneously serve 50 students, with a fair chance
that (unless it's a "lab" environment where everybody is told to do the same
things simultaneously) you will be able to push that to 100 students.

With RDesktop as an option.

The crucial thing is that the kids WILL love it - and time and time and time again,
Sirius (who roll out LTSP regularly) find that the kids simply... don't go near
windows: the windows machines sit there unused (until they are converted to LTSP
clients) because the kids don't find windows "to be cool" any more.

"We gave up on the idea of centralised systems a long time ago with good reason."

Sez you

Stick a CD/floppy in the thing, switch it on and boot from the network, assuming it doesn't support network booting already. tada. X terminal. Who gives a toss about support as long as X works and it can reach a network.

Stick half (less in fact... 1/5 to 1/10th usually) the number of the $300 Dell machines in racks in the machine room, run grid engine and tada... utility computing. want more power? buy more $300 boxes. (actually less than that cost you don't need monitors, mice or keyboards)

You want seriously cheap but highly scalable computing? This is the way to do it...

http://www.ltsp.org/

An area, often forgotten, that has a huge impact on whether open source products are easily useable is documentation. In this respect, kudos to the OOo documentation project who have done a great job this year.

Useful to a smaller group, but very useful to me this year, has been the excellent Linux Terminal Server Project Wiki.

The usefulness of the above resources is in sad contrast to the documentation available for most open source application software. I am very keen to make more use of some of these products, but a lack of good documentation is pretty much a show stopper.

Google the i-opener (or iopener).
Cost $100
Came with a smallish LCD screen and if you hacked it just right it would run Linux (cost another $50 or so in parts, including a cheap small hard drive.)

Some details here and here.

Well, then, maybe I can salvage my KiwiKarma a little...

A good place to start would be Linux Terminal Server Project (click 'Documentation' on the left). Even if it's not exactly what you're looking for, it'll teach you a lot about setting up thin clients, DHCP server, diskless PXE (network) boots via TFTP, mounting root NFS filesystems, etc. They tell you all of this in the context of setting up LTSP, but most of it is general knowledge, and very transferrable to whatever purpose you had in mind.

It might not be everything you need, but I bet it's enough to get you mostly there. At the very least, you'll know what to look for.

As for the symbolic links, that's a little trick I've seen in various enterprise setups, allowing transparent upgrades from the client side, but allowing multiple concurrent installs on the fileserver side.

Example is Firefox. /path/to/apps/firefox/1.07 /path/to/apps/firefox/1.5

Until a couple of days ago, I would also have on the version level a symbolic link called 'prod' or 'current' that pointed to 1.07. Upon installing 1.5 this week, I would test it (maybe via a 'testing' symbolic link, or running from the versioned directory directly). If it works, I would swing the symbolic link 'current' to point to 1.5.

All of the desktops can run firefox via: /path/to/apps/firefox/current/firefox

So the next time they start firefox, they're instantly upgraded -- without reboot.

This can also be applied to network boots. Since you are exporting a path via NFS, you can use the release symbolic link to upgrade whole installations (though, if I recall, there might be some options to tell NFS to follow the symbolic link, since it's a potential security risk. I don't remember, to be honest.) Overnight, once the new system release has been tested, change the 'release link' to the new system version. Things break? Change it back and reboot the workstations.

For large companies, NFS probably will not be the solution you're looking for, but the principles apply no matter what you choose -- AFS, SMB, NFS, etc.

As I noted before, AFS is nice for enterprises, because it a) can be highly redundant, and b) supports filesystem group ACLs. It's also significantly more complicated than NFS/SMB, but allows for lots of neat tricks if you're willing to learn it.

Unfortunately, what you need to read depends on what you need to know, which is dependent on what you want to set up. Fortunately, the system is modular and HOWTO's for popular components are easy to find. Once you get the system running, the rest is just system administration as you would on an individual box.

Hope this helps a little more.

I've been looking for exactly this for a while. I have looked at LTSP, but it uses PXE, which will not work for the machines I have (Gateway Touchpad).

I'm thinking of rolling my own system that boots remotely from lilo or something -- but I haven't found an elegant solution.

I reccommend the Linux Terminal Server Project. You can hook up two dozen machines fit only for the trash to one competent machine and get a solid setup for little cash. Not much local disk access, but if you're just looking for an internet/email lab, it works great, and you can add in Samba to give each box a "harddrive", and printing capablity if that's needed.

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.

Well that's a shame.
I would love to see how they could price it minus the hard drive and software.

It would be great to have it network boot to a Linux Terminal Server

It was also a popular OS for vertial applications such as bank terminals. NationsBank grew from a tiny bank to the 6th largest bank (before they were bought by Bank of America) on a plan of aggressive acquisition. A large part of this strategy was their computer infrastructure. It was heavily based on OS/2: Each branch had a single centrally-administered OS/2 Workspace on Demand server. All computers in a branch would actually boot from the server (LTSP-style), with all of its applications ready to go. If the bank wanted to update their software, they could push these changes from a central point to each branch overnight (or over time), and schedule the switchover. The next day, everyone came in and was completely updated.

You can do the same with Linux (I already mentioned LTSP, but this was almost 10 years ago.

Like they say, what's old is new again.

this what you mean?

http://www.ltsp.org/

The funny thing is that I am browsing slashdot on an ancient K6-2 450MHz with 64MB of RAM and no hard drive. I network booted the machine using Linux Terminal Server Project. The actual server that is running the browser is in another room, and this small machine is nearly noiseless.

Technology only becomes obsolete if you let it. I will be able to use this setup for many many years to come.

Mambo is a really cool project and deserves an award. I just started using it a couple months ago and am really happy with it.

The article could have at least mentioned that LTSP took Best In Show overall.

I think if you really want a quiet PC, get rid of the disk, as well. Mount a network drive from a server room. This simplifies backup, sharing, expansion and reduces the cost and heat at the desktop. As for CD/DVD, I really don't want a 52X drive that sounds like an airliner taking off, but you can't buy 8X drives anymore. That just leaves the high-frequency from the HV supply in the CRT monitor, but a flat-panel LCD will look better on my desk anyway.

The main problem is that it's not covered by the mainstream media. After all, what's more interesting to a publisher, an article covering something related to a major advertising account holder, or a topic that competes with or irritates said account holder? Cities and countries that go back to OSS tend to fall off the radar of the mainstream publishers. When was the last time you read about OSS usage in Korea (aside from Old People jokes) or Spain?

If you want a high profile case, then you can look at what's been going on in Oregon, and especially at Riverdale Highschool. Or you can check out these sites:

• K12 Linux
• LTSP
• Schoolforge
• Skolelinux

For the DIY crowd, some links on linux thin clients:

* PXES
* Linux Terminal Server Project

Why, these folks!

So it seems that the same thing that happened to propritary unix apps in the 80s and 90s is starting to happen now with propritary consumer apps. I'm refering to the stories of upon setting up their workstation or server taking a day to replace all the proprietary programs with the GNU created ones because they functioned better.

Well, this and all other TCO "studies" are BS. They "saved" $100,000 over a completely different solution, not a better one. By this, they kept around their old PCs and threw Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP), and said that was much cheaper than buying new PCs with XP licenses on them. I'm not too familiar with any MS products, but I've heard of Citrix which is similar technology I believe. Granted Citrix is not free, but it should work with their old equipment as well.

However, I will say that I'm impressed that OpenOffice works that well. I haven't used it in a while since my hd crashed, and I have had no need to reinstall it, but I thought it was painful to use (this was maybe a year ago).

Also, I don't believe that proprietary UNIX apps were replaced with GNU stuff until the late 90s. GNU started out to be a free OS to replace UNIX, but it has yet to of happened, but Linux did. Before Linux took off and became a viable server OS, GNU just had a compiler, and various standard UNIX tools, but those were just installed on a UNIX box, not a replacement. Thank GOD Solaris now ships with at least gzip and bash and other GNU utils, that was a pain without those. The compiler was excellent because it was able to at least compile other GNU stuff. Compilers were not very portable back then, and having one that worked on all platforms greatly accelerated the GNU progress.

This is a landmark case because Linux was installed on a number of machines and used for 2 years in an office environment. I would be a little frustrated by using it personally, but if it worked for them, especially with the backwards compatibility with office docs, thats pretty impressive.

The Linux Terminal Server Project would make it "easy" to have everyone be the same.

http://ltsp.org/ and http://k12ltsp.org/ can boot this kind of setup, but you'll need another, low-powered server to store the boot images. It can then find the rdesktop sewrver and work from there. Piece of cake, and your employees may never know that Linux sits under the system at all.

Here in our university(UP), we've been using LTSP to create thin clients. We run a powerful server (2ghz, 1gb ram) and it can host up to 20 Pentium computers.

What's nice about the thin client setup is that once an application is loaded, it boots really fast on all the clients. For instance, we start OpenOffice on the server and it boots with a second on a client.

Another advantage with this setup is control. Since all the clients run on the server, we can restrict access and prioritize security.

Why are these cheap entry-level systems always targeted at the "Third World", rather than poor people here in the US?

Well first off, this article is about people in the UK. These thin clients are also designed for a centralized computer center, school, or business; not home use.

Second of all, in urban areas of the US, there ARE projects like this. Unfortunately, they don't get alot of news coverage-- not sexy enough I guess. They are small, poorly funded, poorly organized, stuck in politics, stuck in government bureaucracy, and there aren't that many of them. But they do exist.

There are also projects which can help in this sort of realm:

http://www.ltsp.org/
http://www.osef.org/ (They've been quiet for a while).

Looks like you are NYC, and I don't know what's available over there.

There are projects. And yes our own poor people are worth helping, but that doesn't mean you can't help the poor people in developing nations.

This sounds like the perfect type of computer to use as a thin client, such as LTSP or perhaps ThinStation. No local maintenance, not even any local power requirements. Just plug into any PoE jack and go.

Could this be a response to feeling the heat from the Linux Terminal Server Project ? Kiosks, classrooms and call centers do well with thin clients and the hardware specs for LTSP let you get by with really old or inexpensive hardware on the client side.

You've probably already seen/read about this but the best project going for thin client computing is the Linux Terminal Server Project, http://www.ltsp.org/. There is an even more brain dead solution, which I have been using at home and also in my dad's office, at http://www.k12ltsp.org/ which is a version of the LTSP designed especially for schools (hence the K12, Kindergarten - 12th grade in the US). They have great instructions and have packaged everything in an easy to use distro that really takes all the guesswork out of it. Most of the time I use an old Pentium with no hard disk and whatever floppy drive came with it (I'm too cheap to put boot roms in the network cards) to boot over the network. Give it a look see!

Chris

You neglect to mention that *using* thin clients sucks monkey nuts.

Not to mention if one person uses all the terminal server's CPU everyone else's thinclient freezes up.

Sounds to me like you did your thesis purely from the admin standpoint and forgot about the poor suckers who have to use the godforsaken things.

The sound works perfectly on the 279 model, not sure about the newer cheaper model.

50 bucks for a keboard and mouse is insane. I usually pay 5 bucks for optical mice and 5 bucks for a keyboards at Frys.

The server is an investment, but what good is a large network without a server to manage things?

Network infrastructure is a given. Its 2005, computers arent all that useful without an internet connection.

Don't get me wrong, I'm knocking your machines. I do enjoy 3D gaming and it looks like your setups are better suited for that.
Its just not as relevant for what I'm using them for.
60 thin clients do X11 over a 10/100 network well enough for web browsing, word processing, programming etc.
I get centralized administration using ltsp, and junk thin clients are very low maintenace. Solid state clients are practically zero maintenance.

Have you tried one of your 4 user machines against an LTSP server? You could lower the ram, remove all the drives and still do some local apps.
Might be worth looking into.

Have you heard of LTSP?

Or how about Windows 2000 Terminal Services?

Or maybe Citrix?

If businesses switch to the 'thin client' model, or anything similar, then this will be a step backwards, technologically speaking, and it will be a decision which is based entirely on financial motives.

As someone who recently switched over an office's mixed Windows network to a thin-client setup based on Slackware and the excellent Linux Terminal Server Project, I claim that this is not a step backwards (technologically or otherwise), but simply a step in a different direction. Yes, it's a lot cheaper all right, but that is not the only motive. It's also:

• a lot faster for the users: the thin clients boot up in no time and everything else doesn't need to boot because it's already up. Also, because Linux caches everything and uses shared memory, programs start up very fast after the first user has started them up for the first time. Finally, everyone gets to profit from the big fat server's execution speed (no, it doesn't degrade significantly from being shared; load is usually under 0.20).
• more flexible for the users: their own user environment is available from any office computer, instead of being tied to one PC, and can even be accessed remotely via SSH.
• a lot more practical for the sysadmin: everything needs to be upgraded only once and everyone immediately uses the new version. No need for manual client installation or risky and expensive central upgrade distribution systems. With SSH, everything can even be safely managed remotely.
• quite extensible: nothing says you are limited to one server. You can either distribute tasks over different servers (programs can run on different computers and be displayed on the same terminal screen, and users won't even notice), or you can combine LTSP with OpenMOSIX and make the server and all the clients participate in a big happy cluster! Imagine running The GIMP and having twenty computers transparently divide the rendering work among them...

In short, the thin client model is highly underrated. It has a lot of possibilities, some of which are either hard to realize or plainly not available on traditional PC setups. It's not universally the best solution but for offices they are typically very suitable.

And no, the PC is not dead and is not about to die. With that I agree entirely.

___________
* Yes, I'm being civilized. ;)

Alternately, you can offload much of the CPU load from the ancient desktop machines to some terminal servers, say a pair of dual Xeons or dual G5s, using the Linux Terminal Server Project. The public schools in Portland, Oregan have done really well with this method for a small fraction of a Redmond set up.

BTW if your school's buying new desktop hardware, go with something PPC-based that can run OS X. You can still run Linux or BSD on it if you want, but you get more performance for price.

19:06:47 up 8 days, 18:43, 5 users, load average: 0.76, 0.81, 0.76
142 processes: 137 sleeping, 5 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 1.1% user 0.7% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 98.0% idle
Mem: 384512k av, 345784k used, 38728k free, 0k shrd, 27748k buff
248060k actv, 10240k in_d, 5444k in_c
Swap: 1028120k av, 184820k used, 843300k free 129364k cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME CPU COMMAND
29982 stuart 15 0 40348 29M 9936 S 0.1 7.8 4:01 0 mozilla-bin
32733 julie 15 0 41144 27M 11720 S 0.0 7.4 0:31 0 mozilla-bin
1489 elissa 15 0 23116 22M 13392 S 0.9 6.0 0:04 0 mozilla-bin
1138 squid 15 0 33612 21M 728 S 0.0 5.7 2:05 0 squid
1310 root 15 0 22276 17M 4956 S 0.0 4.6 0:03 0 X
1454 elissa 15 0 13796 13M 9608 S 0.0 3.5 0:01 0 nautilus
1456 elissa 15 0 11888 11M 8412 S 0.0 3.0 0:00 0 gnome-panel
1322 elissa 15 0 8876 8876 6108 S 0.0 2.3 0:00 0 gnome-session
3536 elissa 15 0 8656 8532 948 S 0.0 2.2 0:09 0 gconfd-2
1471 elissa 15 0 8160 8160 6348 S 0.0 2.1 0:00 0 gweather-appl

since you are presenting a linux desktop anyway, why not use something like ltsp and really be able to lock it down.

Sure. We could all have big, fast, and noisy computer sitting on each desk and have to invest in special cooling equipment. Or we could use thin clients. Put some big beefy computers in a seperate room, cool them with a seperate AC system, and put small quiet computers on everyone's desks. Very few people use their big CPUs 100% of the time, mostly on in bursts, so an office can get away with having perhaps only 10-20% of the previous CPU power in its centralized servers. It's a shame that the MS-centric media has almost killed the idea of thin clients. They're busy hyping up all sorts of other uses for fast networks, but not X11-style remote GUI's. *sigh*

Try to do that with M$! It ain't happening!! ONLY Linux and only with Open Source Software. And it IS happening in classrooms across the nation and the world. My school district is a perfect example. I have done just that.

Now my students can login at any "thick" client (old Pentium I - 133's w/ 64 Mb RAM) and have access to all their desktop settings and files. No matter where they roam, their settings follow them. The thick clients are old "throw away" PCs or donated PCs from businesses or other schools. Our only cost is purchasing the server (with plenty of RAM), the printer and the LCD projector. We COULD even login to a Windows Terminal Server (IF we had one) and have access to all of our Window$ apps. Nothing beats the K12LTSP http://www.k12ltsp.org/ distro!

And they're all running on old donated computers. The average computer in our lab is a PII 200-300 MHz with 128-256 RAM. The two things we purchased were a powerful Dell server with lots of RAM (2 GB) and new network cards (which we bought in bulk). We have about 20 computers in our lab and a couple of class computers that run off of the LTSP server. At first we had to do lots of tweaking and modifications, but now it runs beautifully! Our other lab is a Windows lab which we have to update regularly. We still have to update the LTSP server, but that is just one computer -- it is a pain to update virus software, windows updates, and other software updates for 20+ computers several times a month. We've spent much less time maintaining the LTSP lab than the Windows lab.

This is just my own personal experience with Linux and K12LTSP. I never really used Linux before this project, and have learned a lot since. Thankfully, some people have experienced the same problems as me in the past and the solutions have been resolved. There are also some things I wish I could change, but that's for another discussion board.

Check out the websites for more information on K12LTSP or the Linux Terminal Server Project in general.

I saw that someone else posted about K12LTSP already, but I thought I'd just add my 2 cents.