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Citrix-Like Server for Linux?
Devil's BSD asks: "My school is planning to add remote desktop access so that people can easily access a school computer from home. However, with the financial situation in our Kentucky being what it is, using Citrix Metaframe for Unix/XP and buying all the software licenses necessary will be extremely hard. And with the state department of education (ironically named KDE) very pro-Microsoft, VNC is out of the question. Is there a free or low cost Citrix-like software suite that can give access to a remote desktop and compress the datastream to be able to work on a 56k modem like Citrix's ICA does?"
Check out Tarantella . Similar to Citrix MetaFrame, but less expensive, and runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX.
Now, if you are trying to avoid paying for the ICA client, but you are willing to pony up the money to Microsoft, then there is a client named rdesktop that does the Microsoft remote desktop protocol (RDP). It was reverse Engineered from scratch, and supposedly is reasonable stable. So now, you can run this on Linux desktops, but you still have to pay Microsoft a bunch of money for the apps (just because they are all running on one server, doesn't get you out of paying them for as many concurrent users as there could be).
Now, if you have to have Microsoft Applications, but not a Microsoft desktop, you might want to see the guys who develop the Crossover stuff. Now you can run a lot of Windows Apps on a Linux box that has a Wine processes running remote. The product is called Crossover Office Server Edition I don't follow the legality of this, so get a real good lawyer before you try it out. looks like CodeWeavers is saying, you get to pay Microsoft a bunch of money.
This is probably roughly the same quality, but now your talking about using X for your network transport. Which is a little awkward for remote users, as they will have to run an X server. Cygwin ships with one for Windows desktops.
Now, if all you want is a bunch of desktops you can run remote from a linux server. Get a bunch of machines that can act like X-Terminals. A bunch of old cheap PC's with a good NIC will do the job, as long as the NIC will do PXE, or netbooting of some flavor. Go get PXES from sourceforge and run it. It will net boot, and run rdesktop, a Citrix ICA client, or run as an X Terminal for you. It is very good, and runs pretty well. This is what the city of Largo, FL does. They claim it's great, grand, glorious and best of all, dirt cheap.
I don't understand your requirements. They appear to be directly contradictory. We have to have cool stuff from Microsoft, but we can't afford to pay for it. My guess is the cost of the Citrix Clients isn't nearly as bad as the cost of all of the copies of MS apps you sound like you want to run. Anyways, these are some pretty decent ways to get remote desktops. However, with Microsoft, you don't really get a break on the pricing that way, it does simplify administration of the desktop, and makes replacing broken hardware much easier.
Kirby