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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?
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
DID YOU COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE!
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- Doug McKenzie
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.
My son's 5th grade teacher actually assigned them "write a limerick about a planet". I'm not kidding.
Actually, running this configuration can give plenty of benefits. Yes, you still have to purchase the Windows software, but you don't have to purchase skookum workstations to run them on, nor do you have to purchase expensive MS server software to run a similar setup.
:)
Buy one skookum server for $3000 or so (dual-proc, mega ram, good disks). Then run thin-clients and diskless workstations. Depending on the speed of the client CPU and the amount of RAM on the client, you can either run pure-remote (run app on server, show display on client) or local-mode (download app to client ram, run on client cpu), and even run a combination of the two on the same client.
You have super-stable workstations running the normal Windows software. You only have to administer a single software image (the server) and upgrades are simple as there is only a single server image to worry about. All the clients boot remotely across the network, and the local harddrive is used solely for swapspace.
It's a great concept, and an IT admin's dream -- only 1 box to worry about, full control over everything. All you have to worry about now is dying hardware on the clients.