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One possibility to check out is Linux Terminal Server. All of your users could be logged into the servers, and their workstations essentially become terminals. You could use your existing client hardware and existing servers.

Those are all (except for the last) things I have no use for. And the last is first and foremost a hardware feature. Linux support will come quickly if the hardware is documented. Those weird projects with names written all in lower case are what do useful things for me and my companies customers. We care about getting work done, not about ever more glitzy user interfaces that require expensive hardware upgrades just to make a workstation usable again.

Many of our customers do use Windoze on the desktop. And I do mean doze. I am astonished that they are willing wait 45 minutes (literally and very common) for a mail message to display. Of course, their machines were responsive when they fist got them, but with all the software upgrades, glitzy dodads, (and probably loads of spyware running in stealth mode) the machines gradually slow to a crawl. Then, the users figure the hardware must be "worn out" and buy an expensive new machine. Occasionally I can intercept the discard to use for another LTSP terminal.

XFCE 3.8, installed it just before 4 was released. :( It's based on GTK but it's still far, far, FAR lighter than GNOME... it actually runs well in only 64MB RAM.

Thats quite impressive. Desktop users complaining about X (with KDE most often) being slow, should really see some of that stuff.

As for an X terminal, there are X servers for all sorts of OSes including 286-based X servers for DOS. (FreeDOS.org has one)

But 286's and Linux doesnt mix well last I checked, (donno about 2.6+). Yes, yes, you said FreeDOS, but it also has to be accessible, and many people only know Linux. With modern-PC-style hardware for terminals you are guaranteed better hardware support, and it doesnt really get much cheaper than VIA's Eden mini-ITX. With things like ltsp , you can use the same software base (Linux, Xfree..) for both application server and terminal. I believe thats a great thing for small time operations playing with X and network tranparency.

Instead of going to HP, go out and get yourself a AMD K-6 or something similar, 64 MByte of RAM, and good graphics card from Ebay. If you have money to spend, spend it on a good monitor -- get DVI if you can, the difference to VGA is spectacular. Now, install the LTSP software.

I have one of these setups at home and it is beautiful. When I want to use the terminal, I hit the on switch, when I'm done, I log off and turn it off. There is no hard disk, no great heat source that requires big loud fans, and once it is set up, zero maintainance.

Ah well, there is one born every minute, as they say, and HP probably has all kinds of old hardware they're getting rid of this way, too...

Anything that wants to have a snowball's chance in hell to replace X is going to have to be network transparent, too.

People implementing LTSP are having serious problems with GDM. Most of them just change to another one.
Let's hope that they'll fix it.

Oh yeah, the website is being slashdotted to death right now. Can't check it right now.

Talk to Jim about that. Find him on freenode.net and join #ltsp and ask him how he feeds his family consulting with Free software.

I'd definately focus at least half the machines towards basic Internet access, and would probably prefer using old junker (donated?) machines and Linux Terminal Server Project to host it. The other half should be quite a bit more powerful to run games and an "Office" suite. Quite a bit depends on what your target audience is, which currently seems vaguely defined.

Jonah Hex

640x480x8 - huh? Where did that come from? On most distros, you're given a choice to the color depth and resolution settings when setting up the system. In addition, most distros also autodetect the maximum refresh rate that your monitor can handle, and then sets X11 to just below that value. As far as asking the IT director, maybe not, but someone at a level of authorization to make that change. Before we locked the setting down, we frequently got calls about a user's monitor that'd had been overclocked and consequently destroyed - because they changed a setting (resolution, refresh rate, or both) that they not only didn't understand, but never needed to be changed in the first place.

It's clear you haven't installed a recent release of any Linux distro in the past few years. I strongly recommend you try Knoppix - it runs completely from CD, making no changes to the disks in your system.

Linux is far from rotting - have you seen projects like LTSP? I know entire school districts, and even a few companies that have converted all of their desktop systems to that. Linux is turning out to be a great desktop OS for business environments (finally, a stable OS which is easy to centrally maintain/update, configure, and secure - and not only that, but it stays secure - minus your occasional buffer overflow, which happens on any OS anyway). Though I'd still refrain from trying to switch grandma over, it cant run her cross-stitch program, yet...

Linux and OSS are a community - products that come from the likes of Microsoft are a product, and only that. There are far too many geeks out there (me included), that will do whatever reasonably possible to keep that community alive - it's our livelihood, our hobby, and to some of us, or lives... We're not going anyway anytime soon, if anything we're still growing quite rapidly - thanks in part to the US economy, and dwindling IT budgets. Of-course, having damn good software doesnt hurt either :-)

Ideally, one would never want 100 PCs to deal with. I've worked in such environments before, and there are constantly parts breaking, etc, - its just a major headache. Thin clients with no moving parts are a much better solution. Check out this article on Largo, Florida, and the link to the original article:

http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/12/04/234 62 15

However, suppose you already made the mistake of buying a big pile of PCs, so you want to make use of them until you migrate to something that makes more sense. Rolling out Linux on them all would be relatively painless, and there are numerous ways of doing this. One method would be to go with the Linux Terminal Server project:

http://www.ltsp.org/

Supposing you want to keep the "PC" model, because, say, you don't have the network or server resources for a central login server setup, then there are many ways of rolling out a group of linux PC installs as well. Here's an article that discusses some of them:


http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-12/cloning_01.html


In UNIX/Linux, by default, normal users do not have the ability to modify the system. They have authority only over their own home directories. There is a great deal of security measures that one could take to "lock down" the system to a far greater degree than the average defaults, but the default configuration for most distributions likely offers more protection to the systems integrity than a professionally locked down Windows box.

You can set up Linux in several ways for centralized system accounts and authentication, to achieve, in effect, the type of "domain-like" logins that you are used to in Windows. LDAP servers are a great mechanism to do this (LDAP is actually the protocol on which MS DS is based).

There are numerous ways to centrally manage all of the software installs, configuration files (which determine all system settings), etc., on a network of Linux machines. Linux/UNIX philosophy is that tools are made to be simple and flexible, and to work easily with other tools. This gives the administrator the freedom to set things up the way s/he sees fit for his/her specific environment. Rsync is a good example of a tool with remarkable flexibility for keeping files in sync: http://rsync.samba.org/index.html

Perl has infinite potential and flexibility in systems management. http://www.perl.org

Cfengine is a powerful distributed configuration system: http://www.cfengine.org/

So basically you can patch together a system that works best for you. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of tools that you can use. Many of them are built in, others you might have to download and install.

If you want a commercial "out-of-the-box" management solution, those are available too. Ximian's Red Carpet product is an example of centralized package management. I think I read that Novell was working on some type of management software... I've never looked into commercial solutions, since the free & roll-your-own ones are more than sufficient for me.

As for your quip about no support and problems with drivers - that just shows your lack of experience with the platform. Support is generally a lot better with open source software than it is for commercial software, and its usually free. As for drivers, wouldn't you check to make sure they exist before buying the hardware? Chances are extremely high that any hardware you have in the enterprise today is fully supported in Linux. Its the bleeding edge, just released this month gaming hardware that isn't.

nailed up tight like the original Macintosh. It's not upgradeable, and you can't play games on it, but that's okay, because it costs 500 bucks

remember the iOpener?

Did you boot the client workstations over the network (Using PXE or something similar?) or did you boot both the clients and the server from CD? (The story mentioned the LTSP

I'm curious about how difficult it is to boot clients over the network.

Or just use LTSP

Need to create a mySQL table?

You're right. It's just shameful that marketing thugs from huge software houses such as Apache and LTSP have strong-armed legislators in states such as Oregon and Texas to kill bills mandating consideration of proprietary alternatives where they exist. Let's not forget the evil licensing schemes that say "You must give this software to a friend or you cannot use it."

I've been watching computers waiting for a combination of:

• Small form factor
• Very Low Power consumption
• Low Price

Following this new realization that no one really needs a multi GHz processor for surfing, email, servers, and most all of their coding then the idea of a 30 Watt silent processor has some real appeal.

VIA, with thei EPIA and the Mini-ITX motherboards are poised for some real advances on the user community. While not as power independent as a notebook PC, they can be arguable as portable and certainly more convenient for the desktop cube-ville environment.

The other avenue for computer users to move in is the LSTP thin-client workstations like the jammin products. These are small devices with USB, PS/2 ports on the front. This is a new direction

Not intending to get prophetic here, but I really believe that there is need for a product which has a thin-client architecture with the goal of providing only interfaces:

• USB ports, 2-4
• Firewire

These are all really excellent devices. Now if someone would please sent me the $300 necessary to buy one I would be very happy! I have a lot of noise in my office.

Well, I don't know about *necessary*, but I already have an ltsp client in front of my toilet, and I really like it. I mean, sure, it gets less use than some of the other terminals in the house (I wired up 7 of them with old auction-purchased p-75's) but when you gotta go, at least you can still play kbounce....it sure beats an almanac.

I would mostly agree. Where I work 3 of our 5 employees use Linux as a desktop 100% of the time. Many of our clients are in the process of rolling out Linux desktops to staff. When it comes down to the truly important business-related tasks (ERP client, e-mail, office software), Linux does most everything they need NOW...very cost effectively (think LTSP).

One sticking point we are running into, though, is printing. If a user has multiple printers that they will use throughout the day printing is simply a nightmare. It seems to work differently in every application. And to control things like duplex modes and such it seems to require root access into the printer manager! Am I missing something?

The guy asked a simple question: Is there anything like Citrix that runs on Linux and that is either free or cheap?

I'm not sure where in that question you get the need to know the information that the person requested. Now - if you were the consultant that was hired to handle the project, that would be a different story, but he just asked for advice.

Another user below mentioned LTSP for which more information can be found at the LTSP project's web site.

There is a K12 LTSP project as well here.

As for the KDE comment... I don't think he meant that -- on the surface -- it is ironic that the DOE was named KDE but rather that it is ironic because of the question that he is asking.

While I'm not sure if it's specifically what you're looking for, there is the Linux Terminal Server Project. It works like Winframe but I don't think it's directly compatible with Citrix ICA. But is is on version 3.0 and a few people I know have used it -- I tried it once for a terminal my house but it was a little overkill for just wanting to make a web terminal for the living room.

You can then either boot the machine from an Linux Terminal Server floppy or CD, or from something like a Knoppix CD, or you can netboot them; you don't even have to bother installing anything locally. You wire everything together with a small Ethernet hub. Since nothing is installed on the local machines, it's easy to set up. Applications are run remotely through terminal emulators, X11, or VNC. All you need to do on the server is set up a DHCP server and xdm (if they aren't already set up).

That kind of setup is not going to be a lot more expensive than plugging in multiple graphics cards, but it's a whole lot easier to set up, scales better, lets you add more servers easily, will perform better, and your users will probably be happier, too.

But you can get thin client machines with COTS systems! Check out the linux terminal server project

You can use it with laptops.

It can be a HUGE cost-saver. Schools have shown time and again that students can be very quick to adapt to new environments/OSes. I hope some advocacy group takes up the cause to get schools to consider this option.

The problem ,with the qnx disk mentioned above, is that you can't find the "incredible 1.44 challenge demo disk" (or something like that) on the qnx site anymore... Using the wayback machine, you can see it

And as mentioned on Tiny apps.org, the downloads are available here

Everyone should try these at least once. I was really impressed by what you could acheive with a simple 1.44 floppy disk. You get a gui with a net acess and a simple browser! (And this was done in 1998!)

Anyway, this a good starting point for making those computers works.

One advice i can give it that theses olds computers can be put to simple use like routers or graphicals terminals, but don't expects a lot out of a 386. Your best bet would be to start by visiting google and google directories. You can also try the Linux terminal server project page. They have debian-based packages, so it's not to hard to install on any computer.

My school has a beowulf cluster (no shit - a real beowulf cluster!) using Linux and LTSP. Through it, some of the students have had to install Linux on their home machines, and about 80% find it more prefereable than Windoze. Anyway, like any good parochial school, we have no money, and I've been wondering what it would be like to use Linux for use in the computer labs and study halls. ALl that the computers are used for is web browser, reports, CAD and some math programs, all of which have equivilent OpenSouce Freebies in Linux. Thing is, after buying so many Win98 licenses, no one is going to want to throw away the Win98s.

Why do you need RedHat Network? Just download RedHat or Debian for free and use LTSP. Most schools probably have old hardware anyway, so thin clients would be the way to go.

It keeps being tried every few years and keeps being rejected by corporations.
These guys seem to be having no problem with being rejected. I put together my school's lab for about the cost of two serious desktops, networking included. In fact, Jim McQuillan seems to be making a reasonable living out of selling such systems. It all depends on where you sit, and what you need, I guess.

Interesting, I had no idea people were rendering 3D remotely for realtime display :)

Well, I used to have a cool job like that, but I was greedy (stupid) and took more money to do real work (boring). :-)

SGI had to make GL network transparent because at the time (early 90's) only large machines could do the things they needed to do, so you had to hang xterms off a big box.

Even so, I think that OpenGL still does not need a tie to something so complex as an X server, as polygons have nothing to do with TCP/IP. In the case of Linux, there could be an OpenGL driver capable of rendering to video surfaces (DirectFB full/windowed) or to system memory for sending over the network. Assuming you're using an X server that rides on top of DirectFB, all the bases are covered, right?

I'm going into waters that I know little about, but I thought that X was already optimized for local displays in much the way you're describing... isn't that what DRI (Direct Rendering Interface) and other modules do? I know that's why I can get many frames per second with NVidia drivers under xfree86.

Anyway, xfree86 implementation issues aside, don't discount good remote display capabilities... they can be extremely useful in home and in production environments. Also, projects like The Linux Terminal Server Project allow many nice systems to be built very cheaply for schools, home, and business using X11. The best part is that you have all this stuff built-in and ready in your Linux system... get an old Pentium or PII ($50) with a decent PCI graphics card ($50-$75) and 17" monitor ($120) and hang it off your big box on the network... for everything but page-flip games you won't be able to tell you're running remotely. Nice price for a second PC that requires practically no administration, and can even be floppy based (ltsp).

I'm really suprised none of the linux zealots have mentioned this yet, but one of the best uses a school could have for an old PC is to rip out the hard drive, hook that sucker up to a network, and use it as an X terminal thin client with its display managed by a bigger backroom server.

This is much more reliable and effective than you might imagine. Over 10baseT, X is plenty fast. An old pentium is more than enough power for an X server (even a 486 works very nicely, with a decent vid card). Eight or 16 megs of ram is enough. For the server, to run basic office and net apps you need much less power than you think, because most of the time the processor is sitting idle (what you really need is ram). Plus, you get all the additional benefits of thin-clients in their easier administration and much lower TCO. No more running around to Windows (or even Linux) PCs all over the school--you can forget they exist.

This is already quite a popular way of doing things in cash-strapped schools, and it's growing.

Be evangelized.

The biggest deployment of this kind I know of is in Largo, Florida, with 400 terminals. See also here, and here, aw heck just Google.

LTSP is a very popular package for serving mini X server distros to storage-less PSs over a network.

Funny, all my computers but the server are P133s with 16MbRam and 1Mb S3 video, and they all run Linux with Gimp, Mozilla, and OfficeTLE (OO.o) running almost all the time. I see no problems.
The massive server for these relics from history is a powerhouse Duron 850 with 256Mb.
Go here for some enlightenment on the subject.

This seems to be a great market for Linux, especially with the downturn in the US economy. With software like the Linux Terminal Server Project the machines don't even have to have a disk in them. An old clunker with a fast network connection can easily serve the needs of a school computer lab.

Linux also makes a lot of sense from a durability standpoint in primary/secondary education lab situations. The machines can be administered remotely, and can easily be kept in a consitent state. Administration becomes a breeze, keeping the Linux machines up and running can be a pretty much automated process. Try and do that with a Windows lab!

The only problem I see with using Linux in these situations is finding trained personell to staff the labs. Good Linux people are still hard to find, especially with the lower-than-typical pay scale in primary/secondary education. I suppose this will change little by little as more users adopt Linux both in education and enterprise applications.

"Here you are, a nice shiny new computer. What do you do with it? Why, plug it in, of course". About the best learning software I've seen (and admittedly I haven't looked recently) was MathBlaster. Better tools and better training for the teachers is what is really necessary to make computers work in schools.

What absolute drivel!. I teach in a school division that has increased the student:computer ratio to about 2:1 over the past two years. MathBlaster and Reader Rabbit are nice cute diversions, but they are rarely used as part of a true educational curriculum. They are toys at best, that allow teachers a few moments to do some marking or other preparation work for which they do not get nearly enough time.

The best educational software I have seen is a combination of OpenOffice and Mozilla. I have heard of Grade 6 students using the presentation software to create stories (illustrated with pictures found online), then going into the grade 1 classroom to present their stories to the younger students using a data projector (after having the stories proofread and checked over by their teacher, of course). I do not think that it is a coincidence that both of these are free (both types) products; they don't have a large team of marketing trolls developing educational support materials so their products can be rammed down the gullet of a starving educational system! These programs are run on a *nix based system, including the use of LTSP to allow access to all terminals in the school in a very cost effective means. Maybe the first step to making computers useful educational tools is to install a linux distro, so that M$ and (it pains me to say) Apple, and all the educational software companies, can't get their claws into the schools

Oh my but I did have the good rant going there, didn't I?

Sounds like you're looking for this.

OpenMosix on LTSP is quite easy to implement and there is even a How-To. I have done it myself. If you purchase thin clients as PCs with no local media, you end up with an overpowered client. The people on the mailing list all agree that it should help the server, but no one has seen or shown any hard numbers for this. Bottom line: if your network and clients are both underused, it can't hurt.
At home, I have seven clients which are all P133s (integrated everything for about US$17 each) and one server which is a duron 850 256 Mb RAM. I used to have a Celeron 550 Mosixed to it on a crossover, but the RAM failed, and I never really saw any peformance hit, so I didn't fix it.

why can't schools do this?

I can't believe no one's given you the K-12Linux link yet. It is based on The Linux Terminal Server Project and is customized for school use.

OK, I'll bite...

* How about symlinks? And no, shortcuts don't count (though that's how cygwin fakes it). NT can barely do hard links (you need a third party tool to create them).

* Mounting partitions in any directory (I know win2k can do this, but you still have the c:, d:, etc. drives). And mounting many different filesystems.

* /proc/cpuinfo. /proc/meminfo. Just about anything in /proc that tells you all sorts of stuff about your PC.

* cat /boot/vmlinuz > /dev/dsp. Oh, wait, don't do that :) I guess for kids, logging in remotely and playing random sound files to scare people in the room.

* A well set up security model (yes, NT _can_ be set up correctly, but it seems like often the whole drive is wrold writable)

* Easy remote administration (through ssh of course)

* Native X forwarding.

* This client terminal servers. And kind of along with that, though different is clustering technology.

* Cron. Though NT kind of has this, it's not as easy to use (and the jobs don't run if you're not logged in!)

* Compiling programs.

* Shell scripts. Hell, having a decent shell. Perl, python, sed, awk, grep, less, and all the other productivity tools Linux users take for granted (sure, you can get them for win32, but most people don't).

* More than one workspace for your GUI. More than one viewport within each workspace.

* Text based logins in case you screw something up and the GUI won't work.

* Almost all the software is written with the user's interests in mind and not some corporation's bottom line (though sometimes those two interests are both accomplished). So you get things like popup blocking, for example.

I could go on and on. Most of the things I mentioned Windows can do, but it's not as polished, or isn't as easy to use. Things like Cygwin do clean up Windows a lot, and are great if you have to use Windows (can gcc cross compile to win32?), but having so many nice things native to the OS makes everything smoother.

Don't get me wrong, there are nice things about windows (the GUI is much snappier than X, even on much slower machines; it's gererally easier to get started on; it's familiar for most people; high end games run on it), but there are lots of deficiencies. And I for one prefer working on Linux/Unix to working on Windows, for a lot of the reasons above.

I am a big fan of thin clients, and have administered two setups. When it is done right, the amount of administration work drops to virtually nothing. If you can set up a new company to rely on only web apps or custom jobs, the user has virtually no power to mess with anything, can only use the apps you offer them, and, if they hose their home directory, you simply copy it back from a daily backup for them. Simple and beautiful.
The administration costs on this are minimal, and hardware rarely needs to be upgraded, except to add another server to the setup.

I'm not going to try to defend the notion that a Linux desktop has a lower TCO than a Win 2K desktop, because frankly I doubt that it does. Linux requires admins which, unlike MCSEs, aren't churned out by the dozens by your local community college.

The problem I see here is that most of these Linux vs. Windows TCO studies hinge on the idea that you are replacing a Windows 2000 desktops with a full-fledged Linux desktops, and that's the wrong way to do it.

I'd like to see a unbalanced TCO review of what the City of Largo, Florida has done. Basically, they've got 800 very cheap thin clients (230 concurrent) running X-Windows applications (KDE, etc.) off of a couple big-ass terminal servers. Very similar to the Linux Terminal Server Project, and very cool.

There are so many businesses paying $200 for Win 2K Pro and $350 for MS Office just so their employees can send email and dabble in Word or Excel. It's insane. They could be saving $550 per machine in software costs alone! Not considering the fact that the thin client hardware costs much, much less than the average desktop. And there's essentially zero administration costs on the clients. Let's see a TCO comparison on that.

I'm starting to get off-topic, but I'm excited about the project so what the hell. I'm currently doing a little in-house pilot of the same thing at my employer. I've customized the KNOPPIX bootable ISOs to basically be X-Windows thin clients. You just pop the CD in a machine, reboot, and you get a KDM login box for our terminal server. Very, very cool. Even free server licenses from Microsoft couldn't persuade me to drop this project.

... and boot off LTSP.. Saves power, less noise, easier to manage, etc etc ;)

One guy in particular single-handedly killed an implementation of the Linux Terminal Server Project at the high school with a relentless barage of FUD..

t_t_b

The company I work for saved a tremendous amount of money by setting up Linux Terminal Servers. So now our entire call center runs Linux and we don't have to pay the high costs of "Software Assurance" from Microsoft.

Silly me, I thought I read that they're using diskless Linux Terminals. I must have read a different article to you.

You can get one quality computer and then get several old 486's donated for free. You can have the 486's rebotly boot from the main server (the quality PC). Check out this site. These people make a version of Redhat that is specific for this purpose. Also, check out LTSP.org.

The Linux Terminal Server Project would be a cheap base for your plan - one central high-spec server, with a load of low-spec workstations displaying the served (remote X) terminals.

This is exactly what I wanted to suggest. It's the best solution, especially in terms of maintainance work and fault-tolerance. Make sure to see this clip (RealPlayer unfortunately) to see how adding new computers to your lab would look like if you choose the LTSP way. Take a look at this links:

• LTSP -- Linux Terminal Server Project
• K12LTSP -- Linux Terminal Server Project in Schools
• K12OS -- Open Source in Schools
• K12Linux -- Linux in Schools Project
• GNU and Education
• SEUL/edu -- Simple End User Linux/Education
• KDE Education Project
• Debian Jr. Project

Good luck!

I know this sounds like a joke, but...

Q: How quiet is your computer?
A: My computer is soooo quiet that I need to find a quieter monitor.

Hah hah.

Except I'm serious! I have a fully functional x-terminal set up ... and it really is so completely silent that the faint, high voltage hum/sizzle from my 19 inch monitor actually bothers me. I never even knew it was making a sound until the masking noise provided by the computer was gone.

If anyone here wishes they had a quieter computer, I wholeheartedly recommend setting up your own x-terminal system. It's such a great setup! I still get to have all the fun related to having a massive full tower case - one with screaming 10K SCSI drives, ancient chainsaw-grade SCSI II drives, a tape drive, optical drives, etc - but with all of that noise isolated in another room on the other side of my apartment!

That's the basic idea. You keep a server somewhere in your house, and then connect a basic "x-terminal" (just an old PC) to it via a long network cable (or whole network if you're lucky enough to have one). The x-terminal is typically very simple - it doesn't even need a hard disk. It's also typically ancient enough that it requires little or no active cooling (no fans).

My x-terminal is a mixture of old stuff I had lying around, and a few strategically purchased - yet cheap - new items.

It's built around a Pentium 75 (heatsink only; no fan required) with 64 Mb of RAM (consisting of ancient FPM SIMMS). No hard disk required - it boots off a floppy disk, and then over to the server via the network. As for other components, to make my life easier I decided to get some new, brand-name items just so that everything had a good chance at being autodetected. If you have some extra money, I really recommend doing that. You get improved performance for very little money, and you don't have to go through configuration hell. With that in mind, I installed a $25 ATI 8Mb PCI video card, a $30 Intel 100Mbs network card, and a $20 SB sound card. That's all. There are so few components to draw power in my x-terminal, that I decided to risk removing the power supply fan and just leave the power supply cover off instead (an attempt at enhancing convection which seems to be effective). I still use the exterior computer case so there's little threat of collateral damage (i.e. electrocution). Be sure you really understand the risks before you try doing that though. For most tasks, the speed of the setup is so good that I CANNOT tell that what I'm looking at right now is NOT hooked up directly to the originating computer. For any task (such as an intensive game) that exceeds what the networked/x-terminal setup can provide, I just walk over to the room with my server in it, endure the noise, and work directly off the server. I lose nothing with this arrangement.

This is PERFECTION! I cannot convey how happy this setup makes me. I'd always hated the noise my computer made, but now that I have total silence, I can fully appreciate it. I just have to take care of this monitor somehow ...

How do you set up something like this? It's pretty easy ... check out the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP).

The LTSP packages are extra cool because with them, I've been able to hook-up both my laser printer and scanner to the x-terminal. I've also got the CD-ROM and floppy drove working locally too. So the occasional complaint about x-terminal systems forcing you to go back to the server to do some hardware-related stuff just don't apply here.

Have I mentioned how great this is? :-)

What about using as a cheap desktop rollout for PXES or LTSP?
Keep making it smaller! When it gets down to a size and cost that I can buy three or more for the cost of one PC, I'll spend the extra money on servers and TFT's. That's where my end users will appreciate it!
These may be the key to roll out Linux in the Enterprise!

I've been thinking about getting an older Power Mac and upgrading to an 800MHz G4, and installing OS X on it. There's a couple things that are holding me back, but the most important thing I'd like to know is, is there any support for adding thin-client terminals to a Mac OS X system, like what LTSP provides for Linux?

I don't want to have to pay for expensive software to set up something like this. I'd like to be able to use old Pentium systems, rather than buy more Macs for thin-clients. LTSP uses {xdm,gdm,kdm,wdm}, so there is a different desktop session viewable on each terminal. With whatever is possible with Mac OS X, I don't want one shared desktop session between all the terminals (like VNC).

As a last resort to the OS X idea, I've thought about installing GNOME, Sawfish, GDM, and other desktop-ish programs I would usually use on my Linux box, and setting up something similar to LTSP on the future Mac OS X box. Essentially, I would have what looks like a Linux desktop on the X terminals, but powered by OS X. I'd really prefer OS X's native GUI to X/GNOME/Sawfish, though.

I've done some Googling, but the closest I could find to "thin-clients" with OS X was netbooting OS X on older iMacs, which is far from what I want. Does anyone have any suggestions for software or projects I could look into?

Well, I'm not exactly sure what your specific purpose here is, but I know that the Indianapolis / Marion County Public Library Has set up little Linux kiosks that talk to their main server for doing things such as performing book searchs by title, author, etc and then taking those searches and adding them to your request database.

If this is all for non-profit type of work you might drop them a line and see if they can get you in touch with how helped them set it all up.

I know that the terminals are relatively dumb, and may even be using some form of LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) because when they reboot they drop directly back to a bare desktop with only icons for the software to do their catalog search. So in essence they are all guest accounts.

I've set up a few machines now, each running Debian (Testing, even), that are now in use as public terminals in a university library. They have a minimum of software installed, but Mozilla and Opera for browsing, Acrobat reader and AbiWord for documents, as well as lynx, telnet, ssh, and scp available in xterms (each launched via xterm's '-e' option, so that the xterm quits when the program running in them quits). For ssh and scp, I wrote a couple of simple scripts, using 'dialog' to get input for hostname, username, etc. I'm using IceWM (no Gnome or KDE), with extremely minimal menus and no logout command; it's very fast, and has a Windows-like theme so that it looks familiar to most people. KDM handles auto-login very nicely. Automount handles floppy disks (so users can copy files to and from remote machines without having local hard disk access). Finally, since the machines have identical hardware, I built a custom kernel package for them.

For a 'guest' account, I set up a user in a unique group, and chown'ed all the files in that user's home directory to root, leaving them read-only for the guest. Problem: some programs expect to be able to write to disk, e.g., Mozilla expects to be able to make changes in $HOME/.mozilla -- so I wrote a simple script for each such program that, if the program isn't already running, will restore .mozilla (or whatever directory/file is appropriate) from a master, root-owned, read-only copy. Beyond that, to increase security on the machines, I turned off the various virtual terminals on the console, tightened up /etc/fstab (noexec in /tmp, for example), configured grub appropriately, set up ssh for remote admin (actually the only way I can get a command line on the machine), and set up some simple firewalling rules.

So far, these machines have been completely stable, and our users have been pleased, even those using it mainly to check Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. It's reasonably easy to duplicate across various machines, too -- for only a few machines, this works fine: dpkg -[get|set]-selections to save and set which packages are installed, plus save settings from /etc, scripts from /usr/local/bin, and preferences from /home/pubacc, all of which are backed up and ready for a reinstall. But, if you've got lots of machines to duplicate, there are likely more efficient methods -- like running a terminal server; see, e.g., the Linux Terminal Server Project or the K12 Linux Project.

My recommendation: it's definitely worth a try setting up Linux machines as public access terminals, especially if the programs the users need are few in number (e.g, web browser, telnet, ssh, and pdf viewer, which is all just about everyone in our library wants on a regular basis). Just be prepared to do a little fiddling or simple script-writing to handle programs that expect read-write access to the guest account's home directory, and/or provide an interface for programs that normally are run from the command line.

The biggest one I can think of is the "linux Terminal Server Project",

ltsp

Which has been adapted to public schools in the form of:

k12ltsp

The linux in education folks have tons of info on doing stuff like this and are very wise about digital divide issues.

Here are some links:

open source schools

School Forge

k12os

SEUL/Edu

Some case studies:

seul dat

There is also Simple End User Linux (SEUL)

SEUL

RedHats "Open Source Now" initiative has listings of people in the area who can help out. They also have a bunch of "why's" and "hows" on their site.

Open Source Now

I should be listed there in the Army of Friends, but have not gotten around to putting myself up. Feel free to contact me at cschwan4@attbi.com, as I am in the Seattle area.

Doing this kind of thing is a great interest of mine, and I work in education to help make these transistions.

Hope this helps.

the Linux Terminal Server Project provides superb tools and software to set up a remote display server, you run all apps on the server and do the display on terminals. It works awesomely well, will ease and centralize your administration, and will work with old systems as terminals. If you have a competent admin, setting up guest accounts should be a breeze with this. You also need a competent admin because the server is a single point of failure and has to be kept well-fed and in working order.