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Lots of X terminals were manufactured and are still in use. Universities have a good few and my bank certainly used to use them in branches. They have a much longer usable life than PCs generally do. NCD still makes them, but now they work as Windows terminals and web browsers too.

The price differential is too huge. Most people don't use any of the features of Windows. Really, it's a great OS. I love using it. But if I was a MIS dude at a bank, I would toss it out the window (pun!) because of the cost. Most of the folks at the bank need some email and some access to accounts.

You're exactly right. For example, Barclays do everything with Motif applications running on dedicated X terminals on the desktop and RS/6000 workstations and servers behind it all. A Dell PC running Linux makes a great cheap X terminal, probably even cheaper than the purpose-built ones you buy from NCD. Other banks use their PCs as vt100 or IBM 3270 terminals. Most employees don't even need Office-type software like Word or Excel, they just need to run the one application that the bank wrote itself, or at least massively customized, to do their jobs.

It just makes sense to create an Intranet for all of the internal form filling out work and account access and then use CGIs to do the computing. Let the servers do the work and let the client boxes format it for the screen with Mozilla.

HTML forms are strange, when you think about it. They don't give the sort of rich GUI you can get with Windows/Motif (no combo box, no grid control, no spinner, etc), yet they require a lot of processing power and installed software on the desktop compared to a terminal application. I wonder why HTML forms are still so primitive, they've been around for years now and no-one's bothered to add more exotic widgets, meaning you have to go to Java (which is even more resource intensive than running X) if you want the sort of GUI capability a desktop developer is used to. They would be much better off just using the Linux boxes as old-fashioned terminals and not bothering with trying to shoehorn their apps into a web site.

There are two possible answers.

Perhaps the Cisco kit is the best. If there were better free alternatives, then people would get them. I've been around when a cisco box stopped working. By the time I knew what was going on, some cisco guy had come and replaced the gear and done all the configuration required. This was done in an afternoon. Good support really is worth a lot of money.

As another (less relevant) example; when I was at uni, one of the 4 processors on our Sun stopped working. By the end of the day, an engineer had arrived, hot swapped the faulty CPU and run tests on the new one. The 100 people logged into that machine (yes, 100, all running KDE on NCD X terms) at the time had no clue that any of this was going on.

Perhaps the free version is the best. Perhaps businesses really are that stupid, and don't know that an old 486 running RedHat 5 will do the same job as their fancy megabuck hardware. In that case, there's nothing stopping someone like you going into business selling it.

Citrix is expensive, you need Citrix server licences, Citrix Connection Licences, Win2k server licences, Win2k CALs and Win2k Terminal Services CALs. Not cheap, I firgure I've spent about $600 CD per user on these alone. In the end this will save you money on admin time and headaches. The upfront costs are scary but the TCO is lower.

Thin clients are cool. I use NCD ThinStars and I'm pretty happy with them. They run WinCE, have all the client software built in for Citrix and MS RDP, they remind me so much of the HP X term I used way back when I can't belive it sometimes. Keep in mind you won't have any removable media though.

The thing you have to do before even considering this is audit your software requirements. If you want to setup general use labs with Office and IE, you'll be fine. For a CS lab or an Eng lab where you have stuff like compilers and Matlab installed it just isn't gonna work.

Don't go cheap on the servers, when they go down you are hooped. Of the current bunch out there I like the Compaqs the best, figure on dual proc P3s (Xeons are overkill for this) with 1 to 2 GB RAM and RAID 1 or 5. The boost you get from having a RAID adapter with a big cache is huge when compared to a SCSI system. This server will handle out 25 or 30 people depending on thier usage.

If your software requirements are compatable with the concept I think you should really take a look at it. TCO is much lower, if Office breaks you have to fix it on a few servers, IE uber patches installed a few times, much easier than 100 desktops, belive me. I have two friends that started out with me in the same company 8 years ago and now we are all Citrix admins in different places. All of us have the same opinion, if you have to run a Windows network, this is the way to do it. One of them is the admin for a Citrix reference client.

The only warning I have for you is to be damn careful about the software you deploy. When you have a shared sytem anything can drop the whole boat for you. Be damn careful of HP printer drivers some of the LaserJet drivers will crash you, all of the Deskjet drivers will cause you problems.

Check out these sites for info:
www.thethin.net
www.thinplanet.com
And read these books:
Windows NT/2000 Thin Client Solutions
Citrix: MetaFrame for Windows Terminal Services: The Official Guide

If you have any other questions feel free to email me : electric-monk(at)cadvision.com

In fact, one of these, only make it run X.

While I've not tried it, I don't see any reason that a PC with PS/2 mouse and keyboard, two VGA cards, and a USB mouse and keyboard, couldn't be configured to do exactly the same; run 2 X servers, one configured for the first video card and PS/2 mouse, keyboard, the second for the second video card and USB mouse and keyboard. (you may be able to use several USB mice and keyboards, in order to get as many heads as you can fit video cards in for). As ever, the pig is setting it up.

Of course, you'd need a second sound card for seperate audio, but again that's not too hard.

As for the suggestion that you could do that with X11, well, I laughed when I read that. That's exactly what X and XDMCP is designed for! Have you never heard of X terminals (not xterms)?

When X was developed, the idea was to have lots of thin X terminals and then one big beefy UNIX box to run the applications. Then windows and PCs came along, and they didn't run apps over the network (or at least not until recently).

When I was at college, I had my PC running Linux as a single head, and an NCD X terminal which I'd scrounged from my brother in my room, and in the college's computer room they had some old HP workstation being used as an X terminal. I could easily have 3 people running web browsers, e-mail and news through the one PC (+2 dumb X terminals)

Both of these X terminals were cut-down custom made machines which booted over the network, ran an X server, and broadcasted XDM/CP for any hosts that wanted to offer them a session. It presents a list of machines running XDM, and you simply double click on one, and you get a login screen. Main problem is that both of these "thin terminals" were crap - fixed resolution (at 1280x1024, so usable), but only 8 bit colour depth. Of course, a PC with no hard drive and a decent graphics card would make a better X terminal. NCD still make them - here's a more modern and useful X terminal

The problem is though, that bandwidth over the network is very much less than you get on a PCI or AGP bus - not enough for comfortably doing very graphics intensive stuff with.(back then, I was using 10Mbit, but there are still problems at 100Mbit). Fine for checking e-mail, reading news, even web browsing, but 2D graphics was painful. 3D graphics would be as well - remember that to use things like the renderer extension, (i.e. any fancy 3D GL stuff, or alpha-blending), requires the application to run on the same host as the video card is in, as the app talks directly to the video card; X is only used for the windowing bit, and for drawing basic stuff like text and buttons.

Really, to do this properly requires compressing the X traffic, like lbx or (plug) Tarantella, otherwise it's unusable.

NCD has made combo machines for years we use several here at work and they work fine (though we are 99% Citrix based). Their NCD Business Network Computers line looks like exactly what you need though I don't know the price.

Charles

NCD, the company that makes the thin clients in question, also makes Windows terminal server clients as well.

The comparison in costs would be almost identical because of software licensing costs anyway though.

Easy enough. Buy an X terminal to display all your X11 apps from the Big Noisy Box. Then you can just move Big Noisy Box anywhere you like with a bit of ethernet strung between the two.

Most of the companies building Xterms jumped on the Network Computer (NC) bandwagon. The only major player that survived the fiasco was NCD. They've made Xterms for quite a while. If you are interested I have about 30 of them sitting in my garage. You will need to buy the server software about $300 from NCD, but I'd be happy to sell you (or anyone else) some of them for $25 each (+s/h). (Note: These do not have screens, but have a standard VGA port). Also, you can check out places like CRA that sell (hell they give it away sometimes) used Xterms, WinTerms, NCs, and whatever else you need.

If you want windows, Citrix has teamed up with NCD to make WinTerms that work with Windows 2000 Term Server.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,

From what I've seen myriads of companies attempt to produce thin clients capble of virtually everything, but in a cuter packaging and easy to use. What they fail to see is that their thin client is not a thin client, but is merely a computer, just like others. Thin client has to do something special, not "surf-the-net" and then perhaps "write e-mail" and do word processing, but it has do something you would dedicated a system full time to, such as an X-terminal or any other terminal. Checkout what NCD offers as example of what thin clients should be.

I have been looking around at NCD/Wyse thin clients and similar for a while, as well as the Netwinder, and this falls into the same slot. I want a silent, network-booting, reasonable graphics performance system for my desktop, to talk to Unix and Windoze boxes elsewhere in a closet. The sad part is that all of Wyse and NCDs current lines seem to focus entirely on Citrix/TerminalServer clients, not X anymore.

Get an X terminal (noiseless) and put your computer out of earshot. They are completely quiet and used to be called whisper terminals by some people for that reason. NCD is one of several companies that sell them

About a year ago I was working for Tektronix in their thin client devision providing hardware and software support. Since then Tektronix have sold their thin client devision to NCD. I had the time to browse their website and I have found a possible hardware solution for you.

The NCD range of network computers run an embeded OS called NCBridge. This software supports HTML sessions via a local Netscape v4.x browser, a local windows manager (Motif), X11 support and ICA support for Citrix sessions.

The hardware used to be fantastic when Tektronix owned it and I can't really comment on NCD. But I can tell you that this hardware solution when coupled with a sensible server setup of maybe Citrix/NT-TSE and X hosts you could provide the end users with all of the requirements to access any solution you choose to develop for the server side.

The NCD Network Computer model list
NCD Home Page

About a year ago I was working for Tektronix in their thin client devision providing hardware and software support. Since then Tektronix have sold their thin client devision to NCD. I had the time to browse their website and I have found a possible hardware solution for you.

The NCD range of network computers run an embeded OS called NCBridge. This software supports HTML sessions via a local Netscape v4.x browser, a local windows manager (Motif), X11 support and ICA support for Citrix sessions.

The hardware used to be fantastic when Tektronix owned it and I can't really comment on NCD. But I can tell you that this hardware solution when coupled with a sensible server setup of maybe Citrix/NT-TSE and X hosts you could provide the end users with all of the requirements to access any solution you choose to develop for the server side.

The NCD Network Computer model list
NCD Home Page

I use a number of different 'thin client' type protocols on the networks I administer - X is a good protocol, but not very 'thin'. It doesn't work very well over long distances. On our Lan we have a number of X-terms that connect to DGUX servers, all of which can open a windows NT session on a box running Windows NT Terminal Server with Citrix Metaframe(sure, it's Windows, but get over it - users want Windows/Office). Additionally, we have PCs, Macs, and NCD ThinStar WinCE terminals. All can run the same applications, in many cases much faster than they could on their own machine. Plus, it really saves you money in the long run, because most users don't really use all the power a regular PC can offer, except in brief bursts. Maybe 10K for a huge server, and then any piece of crap can connect to it - instead of spending 1K for every person in the office.

Although WTS is a bitch to configure, once it's there, it works really nicely. Citrix ICA is an excellent protocol - it has clients for windows, mac, linux, solaris, java, etc, and can even be used over a modem, with encryption, with acceptable speed. People with the terminals as clients are easy to take care of. They won't screw up their machines, and if something goes wrong with it, we just pop in a new one and they're back online. Of course, Windows Terminal Server is pretty obscure at the moment, Windows 2000 will support terminal serving capabilities as well.

If you want multiplatform thin client capability, the names you need to know are NCD, Citrix, and Microsoft. VNC is an open-source alternative that works fairly well(although it is far slower than citrix), and supports almost every known platform. Although it has no built-in encryption, it can be tunneled through ssh relatively simply. It has fewer requirements than X, and shows good promise for the future. By the way, they needs more good developers - go to the site.


-lx

I have a Sun layout keyboard on my work and home PC's. For those that haven't used one of those before, they have an extra 11 function keys down the left hand side (with labels like "Front", "Cut", "Help", etc - VERY useful to bind to functions like "bring window to front" etc), and four extra keys in the top right hand corner. Add to that a real Meta key, compose and Alt Graph, and that's a real hacker's keyboard.

The Sun brand keyboards have a different connector than PC's, which gives you two options; either build a converter, or buy an NCD Sun Layout keyboard (X-terminals have standard PS/2 connectors). Part number for that is "N-123 Unix" (or choose an international version).

If you go with the NCD keyboard, they don't support the clunky protocol that most keyboards use and use the pure PS/2 protocol - so you will have to do some heavy key remapping.

Under Linux 2.0 and current versions of XFree86 you can get all keys except F9 and F10 working. Mail me (see home page for address) to get a copy of keymaps for this.

The Linux Input Driver patch to 2.3.12 will make all the keys available, but is not currently at a production stability level.