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The Thin-Client Challenge?

Posted by Cliff on from the might-be-something-worthwhile-here dept.

An Anonymous Coward asks: "A friend of mine showed me this webpage which basically asks this question and offers a challenge to create a UNIX-ish Thin Client that can connect to a Windows terminal server. He really is serious, and has attempted this on his own before. Any hope out there in the Linux world for a small, easy to deploy thin-client only distro?" This is not the first time this question has come thru the pipe before, however I figure if someone can answer this challenge, all will benefit. Does anyone think this can be done? If so, speak up, if not, please give reasons as to why.

3 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. who wants the $150? by spike666 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    go here:

    http://www.ltsp.org/contrib/diskless-windows-how to .htm

    why do i suspect that this guy is gonna pay someone $150 and then turn around and charge a client $15000 for it? maybe i'm just too cynical after reading about the Fink deal.
    *sigh*

  2. Not too difficult by uslinux.net · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This sounds fairly trivial, actually. From his specs, assuming a standard set of hardware, it wouldn't be too hard to build a stock kernel, X with standard SVGA, use the splash screen patches to hide the messages, and install rdesktop (which, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is similar to the Citrix client).

    In fact, he could even do a thin-client boot from the network and go diskless (which would make maintenance even easier), though for his specs, mounting most the partitions read-only and running reiser or ext3 on anything which changes would probably suffice).

    I'm fairly sure I could do this in very little time, but I'm sure someone with more free time (since this project isn't paying enough for those of us who need to pay our rent) will beat me to it :-)

  3. Bootable Business Card + rdesktop by Wonko · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Go to www.lnxbbc.org and a copy of the bootable business card cd. You can get the latest copy out of cvs, get a copy of their simple little build script and add whatever you want to it. I've got my own personal copy that I've added a few things to, one of which is rdesktop(and X11 rdp client).

    It has XFree86 on it, and runs on the framebuffer, so it should work on darn near anything. It's got drivers for every nic I've tried it on, already on the disc. And it's worked fine with every pcmcia nic I've tried.

    Shouldn't take too much effort to make it boot straight to X, and start an rdesktop connection. Anywho, it's a place to start.

    Pat