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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.

1 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. 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 :-)