Wine Terminal Servers?

e8johan asks: "I have been thinking about trying to sell a Linux based thin client solution to different markets, like schools. One of the big problems with migrating to Linux is the loss of old applications such as Microsoft Office. Has anyone tried to combine Wine and the LTSP? Does it work? If so, it would enable me (and anyone else) to sell services based on a free (as in libre and beer) server running both open office and their proprietary equivalents in a Windows-like environment, thus reducing the migration costs and making the offer more attractive." While this would be an interesting to tackle, would the licensing terms on some proprietary packages complicate such a system?

Comments

crossover has something like this already

[Kastor]

I believe that crossover are selling a server based version of thier enhanced wine that will allow for such access, like citrix and terminal services.

->Kastor

Re:crossover has something like this already

[Lxy]

Crossover Server from Codeweavers. It's a fine product.

The guys at Codeweavers are really nice, they'll give you a trial copy if you ask nicely.

WOW!!!!!!

[Asprin]

DID YOU COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE!

How do you spell 'synchronicity' again?

Try it...

[grunthos]

I have been thinking about trying to sell a Linux based thin client solution

Has anyone tried to combine Wine and the LTSP? Does it work?

<troll>Trying it out would be more useful than just thinking about it.</troll>

Yes, it works fine. As well as Wine does for any Windows app. I'm running it at home. My kids are impressed at how much faster their 486s run as terminals compared to running a local copy of Windows. They're also disappointed that game support sucks.

The biggest problem is Wine's varying level of support for the various DLL's required. This is standard Wine FAQ stuff. You can get widely different results based on whether you use Microsoft DLLs or Wine's built-in reimplementations. Licensing would be a big issue using Microsoft's DLLs.

The second biggest problem is that you're essentially doing streaming video over the LAN, so you can forget about arcade games or anything with high screen update rates. That's a terminal problem, not Wine. TuxTyping has the same problem. (Can anyone recommend a *good* typing tutor that works with LTSP?)

Standard desktop apps work fine. It bugs me to admit it, but I still find Irfanview under Wine to be a better picture browser that the other X/KDE/Gnome ones I've tried.

Run MS-Office? Probably wrong question.

[leonbrooks]

The right question would involve working with and exchanging Microsoft Office documents, in which case your answer is OpenOffice.org, and you can start off by running that under Windows, and continue to run it on machines that remain Waindows for whatever reason.

In general, you should be replacing apps that are tied to Windows with portable ones (e.g. replace IE with Mozilla) first or in parallel with setting up a thin-client LAN.

I use both WINE and Win4Lin in LTSP-like situations. Win4Lin is actually running Windows, so of course compatibility is much better, but Win4Lin isn't any good for high-bandwidth (video) or 3D (games) stuff, even not over a LAN. Both WINE and Win4Lin usually run an app noticeably faster that it would natively on the same machine.

Sound is also very expensive on bandwidth. For these situations, running the app locally is often appropriate. Even a Pentium 133 with 32M of RAM will play Oggs and MP3s without flinching.

In terms of workstations, network and video card, in that order, are most important, followed by RAM. Run the workstations through a switch, not a hub. If the link switch-server can be gigabit, even better. It's actually hard to buy seriously crappy-spec video cards these days (although SiS are working hard to fill this niche), but if you can get, for example, TNT-2 cards to replace S3Virge cards cheaply, then do it. A good card will give much more satisfying results, even if (as in this example) the driver itself (nv, but you also have the choice of NVidia's binary-only drivers which are much faster and slightly buggier) isn't so hot.

If you're buying diskless workstations new, then a well-chosen nForce board is good. If you put a hard disk in the workstation, you find that the board is trying to do too much, and you often get glitches and low performance; but if it's only running LAN and video, it seems to get along just fine. It's also hard to buy less than 128MB of memory these days, which makes the option of running multimedia apps locally (shipping only the compressed source data over the LAN) much more attractive.