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Some businesses are just switching to thin RDP/Citrix clients like this: http://www.wyse.com/products/cloud-clients/thin-clients/C10LE

A friend of mine has them at work. Somehow he manages to get stuff done with it.

Wyse makes some that are deployed at a client of ours. http://www.wyse.com/products/cloud-clients/thin-clients

It's not a true cloud setup as they are using RDP to connect to a local terminal server, but this server is replicated at a remote data center, so if the server were to go down because of a hardware issue, they could then be redirected to the remote server.

I'm not sure which model they are using but I think it's either the Wyse S10 or S30. These have a very basic OS build in that allow some windowing support so you can have multiple RDP sessions, they also have some that support dual monitors.

There have been cases where were one of the boxes has gone bad and we swap it out, but that's a simple case of unplug the power, monitor, keyboard, and mouse and connect them to the new box and the user is up and running right where they were.

Even with this setup, it hasn't removed the need to support individual users. It has removed a lot of the hassle of hardware failure causing weird issues only they see. But users still run into issues they need individual support for.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/27/sysadmin_wyse_thin_client/

Cheers!

PS: they Wyse openSUSE friendly ones.

http://www.wyse.com/thincomputing/index.asp

http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/index.asp

See? This is nice: http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/thinclients/R50LE/index.asp

Amazingly wonderful - if only the world would move off Windows. Again, as I've stated before, it's not a matter of how wonderful the technology is. Sadly.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/27/sysadmin_wyse_thin_client/

Cheers!

PS: they Wyse openSUSE friendly ones.

http://www.wyse.com/thincomputing/index.asp

http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/index.asp

See? This is nice: http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/thinclients/R50LE/index.asp

Amazingly wonderful - if only the world would move off Windows. Again, as I've stated before, it's not a matter of how wonderful the technology is. Sadly.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/27/sysadmin_wyse_thin_client/

Cheers!

PS: they Wyse openSUSE friendly ones.

http://www.wyse.com/thincomputing/index.asp

http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/index.asp

See? This is nice: http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/thinclients/R50LE/index.asp

Amazingly wonderful - if only the world would move off Windows. Again, as I've stated before, it's not a matter of how wonderful the technology is. Sadly.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/27/sysadmin_wyse_thin_client/

Cheers!

PS: they Wyse openSUSE friendly ones.

http://www.wyse.com/thincomputing/index.asp

http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/index.asp

See? This is nice:
http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/thinclients/R50LE/index.asp

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/27/sysadmin_wyse_thin_client/

Cheers!

PS: they Wyse openSUSE friendly ones.

http://www.wyse.com/thincomputing/index.asp

http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/index.asp

See? This is nice:
http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/thinclients/R50LE/index.asp

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/27/sysadmin_wyse_thin_client/

Cheers!

PS: they Wyse openSUSE friendly ones.

http://www.wyse.com/thincomputing/index.asp

http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/index.asp

See? This is nice:
http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/thinclients/R50LE/index.asp

Have you seen a thin client since the 80's? They have file systems these days, some of them even run a very stripped down version of XP. You might want to go here, http://www.wyse.com/, and update your knowledge on thin clients. .Many things have changed since the green screen days.

To qualify as a thin client in my book, the device has to be thin "all the time", i.e. not a PC used mainly for browsing.

I don't know that your definition of thin client agrees with the market. Most of the windows based thin clients that everyone is complaining about (big harddrives, etc) are the result of re-purposing outdated systems to get a little more life out of them. For example, a previous employer didn't want to spend all the money necessary to upgrade every PC to run XP well. Instead, they installed Win2000 (getting Win95 machines off the network), and then connected them to Citrix servers.

WYSE is a good example of current generation thin clients. When I left my former employer they had concluded extensive tests deploying thin clients to various employees, and were happy enough that they were buying new ones in batches of 30-50 at a time. They found that they could replace 3-4 PCs at about the same cost as getting one new desktop PC.

Of course, not everyone was moved to a thin client. Anyone who made a case for needing a real PC kept theirs. And a few were able to get an additional thin client as well.

But that would be about the dumbest, most inefficient, and most laughably bandwidth-intensive computer setup I can possibly imagine.

Some people really like it.

It's called PXE boot. It's real popular in some circles. My mythTV boxes all PXE boot from a common system image. It saves custom configuration time and makes certain things easier.

Built-in Internet Explorer. Set it to autoload on start-up. Not even any moving parts to break.

http://www.wyse.com/products/winterm/S30/index.asp

I don't know, I only used the whole terminal on a db25 serial port on my ASUS-PIII system. I seem to recall the one I used had a RJ9 style connector. You could use this info to adapt a cable for the RJ9 style Wyse keyboard connector to try.:
http://www.wyse.com/service/support/kbase/wits/802 19.txt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS/2_connector
USB would be another matter...
Hours of fun! I'm betting they probably won't work, and I certainly would not try it on a new PC that I cared about. Perhaps some of the older ones with RJ9 connectors might work, but the newer DIN connector ones certainly won't.

Here is the knowledgebase on the old Wyse terminals:
http://www.wyse.com/service/support/kbase/wyseterm .asp
The info on all the old keyboard models is available there.

I did love that keyboard though, much like the old IBM ones. My standard keyboard now is the base Keytronics model, it sets the standard in price, durability and feel in my opinion. Check out the environmental and mechanical data, pretty amazing. I have abused mine horribly for the last 8 years without a single failure. All these new cheaply made keyboards with volume wheels and programmable buttons that require windows drivers are just plain retarded as far as I'm concerned.

I don't know, I only used the whole terminal on a db25 serial port on my ASUS-PIII system. I seem to recall the one I used had a RJ9 style connector. You could use this info to adapt a cable for the RJ9 style Wyse keyboard connector to try.:
http://www.wyse.com/service/support/kbase/wits/802 19.txt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS/2_connector
USB would be another matter...
Hours of fun! I'm betting they probably won't work, and I certainly would not try it on a new PC that I cared about. Perhaps some of the older ones with RJ9 connectors might work, but the newer DIN connector ones certainly won't.

Here is the knowledgebase on the old Wyse terminals:
http://www.wyse.com/service/support/kbase/wyseterm .asp
The info on all the old keyboard models is available there.

I did love that keyboard though, much like the old IBM ones. My standard keyboard now is the base Keytronics model, it sets the standard in price, durability and feel in my opinion. Check out the environmental and mechanical data, pretty amazing. I have abused mine horribly for the last 8 years without a single failure. All these new cheaply made keyboards with volume wheels and programmable buttons that require windows drivers are just plain retarded as far as I'm concerned.

About 5 years ago I used an old Wyse terminal I got at a junkyard for exactly this job using a homemade cable, it worked beautifully. Once complete I then used the terminal to control and update the server from the living room couch.

I also used the same terminal and SoftIce to *ahem* "debug" several windows applications.

Wyse terminals (at least the older ones) are excellent gear, very sturdy, nice keyboards, though the monochrome monitor was a bit burnt in on the one I used. An industrial strength terminal for a rock solid OS. A match made in heaven. FreeBSD is an excellent OS.

Here you go: http://www.wyse.com/products/winterm/ We're buying those next year instead of desktops.

These things are really x86 PCs, with upwards of 64MB of memory. They're quite capable computers. The Neoware C50 is a desktop Linux system with no hard drive, for $259. The Wyse S50 is another comparable Linux box. Wyse even has a dual screen model. The HP model runs Debian. HP is having a sale - buy 3, get one free.

Neoware even has a thin client notebook computer. It's only useful when it has a WLAN connection. This is promoted as a security feature; if it's stolen, there's not much data in it.

This may be the way Linux comes to the enterprise desktop. To many companies, this is a cheaper and easier conversion than moving to Vista.

Well VMWare and Wyse have come out and released a new Wyse Thin Client that supports VMware's remote console. http://www.wyse.com/about/news/pr/2006/0802_VMware VDI.asp There is a seminar going around for this, but you might have to ask either VMware or Wyse about this.

I received an e-mail from VMWare just a few days ago on this very subject. They seem to be partnering up with Wyse to provide a complete solution for using VMs as thin clients. I haven't had time to fully investigate, but it may be worth a look.

The clearcube stuff sends *analog* video over either CAT5 cable (200m) or fiber (further). The desk-end of the link has knobs you have to tweak to "tune" the video: over those distances, the attenuation is much greater at high frequencies, so you have to compensate. And the propogation time down each pair in the cable is slightly different. There is a digital channel for keyboard and mouse, and I believe that they have USB though I bet it has limited speed.

Compared to digital thin clients (VNC, Sun Ray, Microsoft remote desktop) there are advantages and disadvantages:

- Limited distance.

- Need to physically change wiring to associate a desk-end with a different machine.

- Low latency. Mouse movement is instantaneous. Games looks great.

- Limited maximum resolution. 1600x1200 would be really hard. 1280x1024 isn't great at 200m. Small text gets hard to read.

- Software doesn't notice the difference from a real display.

Personally, I think that the best use for this sort of technology is when you want remote access to a legacy system (OS/2 anyone?) or you want to debug the bios settings remotely. Companies like Adder (http://www.adder.com/) and BlackBox sell stuff that's ideal for this. For all other uses, I'd go for a digial thin client like one of the Wyse (http://www.wyse.com/products/winterm/S50/index.ht m ) boxes (they run Linux).

Something like this....?? http://www.wyse.com/products/winterm/index.htm

Sure, just use one of these =)

http://www.wyse.com/products/winterm/3650xe/index. htm Wyse Terminal to an RDP session. http://www.google.com/froogle?q=3650XE&btnG=Search +Froogle About half the price too.

I found the clients we use: Wyse 1200le

"I want to know why the X capable clients cost so much more than the Winterm clients."

They don't. The HP t5700 starts at $599. A similarly configured Wyse 5540XL costs about $629, runs SuSE Linux 7.x, which makes it X compatible, and also has RDP and ICA clients.

In other words, it's much more flexible than the HP unit, costs about the same, and runs X.

Any pointer? Wasn't that an old text-processing terminal company?
I have found this but I have no idea what this story refers to.

Like this?

Handhelds aside, WinCE market might develop also through desktop thin-client (think Citrix) terminal hardware, some of which run WinCE (Wyse for instance). Of course you can use linux for this kind of hardware aswell.

For your regular office worker with a spreadsheet, word processor, email and maybe some custom software that their company uses, something that hooks up to a terminal server and provides input, display and connectivity interfaces is enough. This kind of hardware will replace many company desktops and WinCE is well placed within this market.

This is just a new spin on thin-clients...look at the specs

Citrix® ICA® Client 6.0
Microsoft RDP 5.1

http://www.citrix.com/products/metaframe/default.a sp
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/technologies/ terminal/default.asp

http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/ProductInfo/term inal/default.asp

This is the revival of a product released over 8 years ago, the Wyse Winterm 2930: a DOS/Pen based wireless Citrix winterm.

There was no RDP support of course because it hadn't even been envisioned by Microsoft at the time - in fact, Microsoft was having tremendous legal headaches involving software licensing on Citrix's special "multiple simeotaneous user" versions of Windows NT 3.1 and later 3.5. This culminated in the establishment of MS's internal "Hydra" project and the creation of Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services Edition and the later integration of this "Terminal Services" software into as much as possible all the way down into the Windows XP Home edition.

Which is why this is now a viable product - Cheap touch panels, better batteries, and a larger market should make this product fly again - even if it is made by someone else.

A real wireless monitor -- now that would be something to see!

~GoRK

At the local college here, we have 8 Citrix ICA servers (nice, dual proc 1ghz xeon, tons ram) running NT4.0 terminal server. Its a nice fit for the students/fac, and the NT shop that is ran here (we're working on changing it). We were buying a few of these WYSE winterms to deploy across campus to allow access, but at over $800 a pop those things get expensive in a hurry.

So, in order to save money and provide loads more functionality, we bought a thinknic and i went about the process of hacking the hell out if it. there are tons of websites (hack-a-nic.com, and yahoo's groups are just 2) that describe the in's and out's of this $199 piece of hardware.

all in all, they are pretty easy to hack. the standard OS is based of debian i believe, and runs 2.2.x (i forget). anyway, the window manager is blackbox and you can change the menus a bit to add right-click desktop functionality and turn off the always-on netscape session. I have ours with a custom background, and updated version of citrix, mozilla instead of netscape, and links to a telnet client and ssh. i also have one that i am testing that uses a PAM module to authenticate off of the NT domain so the user can open and run a couple of native apps like abiword and gnumeric and save their work to their NT network drive.

We now have about 25 of these things scattered across campus, and they work great. you could also use them to connect to a linux terminal server instead of windows. Next up for us is providing full X-terminal functionality to a couple of linux servers to provide remote application support. these are really nifty boxes.

Aren't G3 Cubes fanless? Get one of those and run Linux on it, or OSX+X on the BSD.

This is not perhaps a cheap solution, but should be a quiet one.

These days you'll find most thin client machines running gasp! WinCE and Termincla Server/Metaframe clients, but there are still people making X terminals I'm sure.
For example, Wyse offer X11 as an option on some of their their winterm products.

What else could you try...if a web browser is enough for you then something like a dreamcast might do, although I dunno how easy it is to get broadband support for them.

Oh, I suppose if you don't mind DIY you could run cables from server room to your bedroom. Videk, for example (you may have a better local supplier for this sort of thing) make all sorts of little toys: devices to boost the signal so you can use 50m mouse, keyboard and monitor cables; boxes that let you run 1600x1200 video over 120m of twisted pair, etc.

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.

As for control keys, my personal opinion is irrelevant. The fact is that I am a system administrator and not a programmer. Therefore, I am constantly using different systems as I check things out and help people. So, I really need to have a keyboard on my own desktop which has the control key in the SAME PLACE as all those other keyboards. For me, that means down in the bottom left/right as on PC keyboards.

I am curious though, on the one hand Tom said that there should be two control keys, which their are on conventional PC keyboards, and they he said that he liked the placement at the left of the "A" key. Well, where would the second key go? If you put it on the right at the same level you'd conlfict with the return key...

As for arrow keys, I do find them useful, but would like them to be closer, so that they are easier to use. The best layout that I've ever come across was on old WYSE terminals that I used to use years ago. Wyse are still in business and you can see a keyboard layout here: www.wyse.com/terminal/specs/ascii.htm They have the arrow keys merged into the bottom right corner, and it worked really well for me.

Art Mulder

and you have MS Terminal Server and/or Winframe (I know, those are costly and not OSS), you can try Wyse's discontinued Winterm 2930. This is a 3lb wireless terminal that connects to the Winframe box and has complete control over its session. 8.5" 256 color touch-screen, communicates at 2.4 Ghz with max bandwidth of 1.6 mbps... Not bad from what I've seen, but it can't do linux (unless someone has ported the ICA-3 protocol).


************************************************** ***
My nick's Cryogenic, but I haven't received my password yet!!

Well as a followup to my own post, I actually found the wireless Winterm 2930 on Wyse's discontinued products page (Didn't know they had a page for that!)

~GoRK