Posted by
Hemos
on from the beaten-out-the-coffee dept.
Denovous writes "WYSE is apparently producing a new Linux thin client based upon the Slackware distribution, instead of Java as originally planned. The client can be started without a network, as the OS resides in 8.5 MB of memory. Check the article out here
"
Does any one else find it ironic that one of the adverts above and below the article is for Windows Beta 3? If you are interested in a Linux thin client you certainly are not looking for an unfinished bloatware desktop which you get to pay to find bugs in.
Well I thought it was ironic.
It still doesn't really compute, though ...
by
timothy
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· Score: 1
Granted, thin clients are clients, and not stand-alone devices, but the first poster has a point: Why pay $800 for a box that is essentially a processor, memory, monitor and keyboard, when a fully-functional box with a CD drive and a massive hard drive can be had for far less?
Dell talked about selling something similar (though that was 2 / 2.5 yrs ago), but it would have run Windows, because Dell hadn't wised up to Linux at that point. I don't think they ever really got made, but the concept is the same as these WYSE terminals... diskless / floppy-less workstations, bootable over a network and designed for easy administration / uniformity in corporate environments.
I asked the same question then (working for an ad agency and thereby for Dell) and still have never gotten a really good answer why it would be better to pay more for fewer / lesser components. If I can get a PII with 64MB of RAM, an 8GB hard drive, a 15" monitor and a NIC for $600 (realistic? too conservative? too hopeful?) right now, I could use the hard drive, floppy drive and CD drive for target practice at a shooting range for far less than the privelege of having someone sell me a processor / memory / NIC / monitor combo. And that counts range time.
Is there some aspect to this that I just don't get? What justifies the cost of these things? Getting hundreds of computers custom built, these days, is no big deal -- and you don't have to specify any naughty security / administrative hassles you don't want, right?
Wrong, the reason for NCs is the cost - not the (purchase) price. It is all to do with Total Cost of Ownership over the lifetime of the unit. PCs in corporate environments, even used as glorified NCs still cost too much. That's without taking into account their power consumption etc.
For once Slackware is put into the lime-light it deserves. It is IMNSHO the most effic^H^H^H^H^H compact distro out so far.
I made my own "thin client" w/ Slacky: a 486/33 with a 204MB HD. I had Slack 4.0, complete Netscape, and all tcp/ip utils running with 50MB of room for userspace and a 10MB swap. Gets ~1Mb/s thru-put off of the wcarchive through our cable modem network. Not bad for obsolete hardware!
At no point does the message say you are *required* to buy the product to get the source.
Good Question!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I'm glad someone is asking this question. It has bothered me for a while that IGEL, an innovative linux thin-client company, charges about $800 for the source distribution. Of course, all that they have done is add a few of their own drivers to a standard linux distro, but they have not put the source back out in the way that everyone else plays the game. Their page on their software describes linux features (multi-tasking, etc.) as if they invented it, and as if that is what one is paying $800 for! I checked their site (http://www.igel.de/indexe.htm) before writing this and it appears that now they have dropped the option of obtaining software completely. Now one can just buy their flashcards. This doesn't exactly help to advance linux as a thin client solution...
Maybe not!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Does anyone know anything about the diskless workstation cards offered by lsl (http://www.lsl.com/catalog/hardware/dlwksta/index .htm)? They list at $90 (!). The maker is "Dynamic Results", but no homepage is given...
The USB hardware spec is FIRM. So they can buld that into the box. Only the software needs work, and after they get it going, because the OS is flashable, they can update it.
End of Story.
Gee, I bet...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You could make a really cool Beowulf Cluster from these things!!!!
Sorry, had to do it.
Fog
--Half-Life means I have no Life--
Re:Gee, I bet...
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Anonymous Coward
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Yeah, but does it run Linu... oh. Nevermind.
Re:quake over thin clients
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Anonymous Coward
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Actually, the unit doesn't have enough flash memory to fit all of Quake (Quake needs 50 megs or so), but it would be possible to have this unit run Doom or Heretic (~15 megs) if everything else is deleted.
Re:USB?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
No worries, we put all the source on a CDROM that comes with the product.
Although your argument is flawlessly correct, the point is that it's a bad idea. Java NCs are just as bad (arguably worse) than these WYSE terminals. Either way you're going to have terminals sitting around with outdated flashware. The fact that it would be the same with JVM doesn't make the Linux solution any better.
nc's are great, for everyone but you
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
$800+ for a box that can't beat a $600 box.
I can go to my PC vendor down the street and have them built me 100 boxes that don't have an HD, or much RAM, and boot from a network.
NC's suck. Haven't we learned our lessons from the X-Terminal days?
The best terminal is a computer which can shift computing from client to server as needed, not one that is hardwired.
I don't know how Wyse does it, but the Netwinder boots directly from a 1M flash chip, mapped as ROM rather than as a disk drive. The flash contains a small (~64k) boot loader + debugger and a compressed Linux kernel, and can also contain a compressed initrd image (handy for some 'rescue' situations where you've trashed your hard drive; with 1M flash there's only room for a couple of utilities).
The one thing that concerns me about embedded linux boxes like this is what happens when 3 months down the road someone finds a DoS for the kernel thats installed on these boxes. Even if its flashable, chances are there will be more boxes left un-upgraded than there will be maintainted boxes. I hope this doesnt turn a feature (open source) of linux into a fault.
When someone says Flash memory that means a ROM that can be changed. So when a new kernel comes out or a patch is relased they just have all the clients load the new patch. It's not anymore difficult that having a bunch of fat clients doing it off an NFS.
-- I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
It's a Cyrix MediaGX Machine
by
MrGuru
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· Score: 1
It's a Cyrix Media GX (up to a 200Mhz in their 5355). Granted, it is a bit expensive, but at least it isn't an NCD overpriced WinCE toy.
Anything is better than WindowsCE for thin-client workstations. If it runs linux, all the better. The largest problem of course: Citrix 3.x ICA client (no seemless windows) and no RDP support. It's a better X than NCD's cludge.
The client can be started from memory (flash), but at least the last time I talked with a Wyse rep, it does require a memory upgrade of the box to 16M of RAM. The other cost is the PCMCIA "root" filesystem - those memory cards aren't cheap.
Same thing goes for Netier. They use up to a 300Mhz Cyrix MediaGX machine as well - with harddrive/floppy/pci and other neat goodies as options. It shouldn't be hard to get one of them to run Linux either. Imagine a beowulf cluster made out of those tiny little things.
Still waiting for other neat ports (like StrongARM to the HP Joranada 820), or ANY other *normal* WindowsCE platform that would fight for market share. What would you rather be running on your palmtop?:)
Not for power users
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Anonymous Coward
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NC's are NOT for people like you who can go down to your local shrink wrap store and buy 100's of PC's without hard drives. NC's are for IT people who don't have the time and/or the money to setup, configure and maintain thousands of full blown PC's across a corporation.
No different than a JVM bug.
by
bkosse
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· Score: 1
Re:quake over thin clients WILL work
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BadlandZ
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· Score: 2
Maybe, maybe it will work.
First of all I don't know anything about games, I don't play them. But that doesn't mean you can't run a big game on a thin client.
You run the game on the server you connect to, not the thin client. The client only runs X. And OpenGL might be in XFree86 4.0, so if they wait for that, and used it, it would probably really rock.
My work on thin clients has shown me that there are even some preformance gains IF you configure your thin client right. The thin client's CPU and RAM only runs X, and you want a rocking video card (From my experiance doing molecular modeling and such). But, your bottle neck is bandwidth, not video or ram. All the background calculations to tell the video unit what to render are done on the server, if the server is fast, that will be fast. If the thin client has a good video subsystem, it will render the graphics fast. Since the thin client has it's own CPU, and if the video unit is fast, it has the potential to blow away a "complete system" because one box does video, and one does the application, and your not bogging down any one system by doing both on it.
The problems are, 1) you piss off other users that are on that server. 2) you frequently find the bottleneck is the data transfer rate between the server and the thin client (espically on 10baseT or less) 3) Most thin clients just don't have really rocking video subsystems.
Now, at home, I have a Linux box that I call a "server" in a generic sence, that is basically my workstation. I also have a lesser linux box (good video, good monitor, 32M RAM, MilleniumII vid card), that I run just as a thin client off the server. I have found that some applications (particularly that use a lot of CPU time for the application, AND a lot of CPU time for X) are much faster on the thin client.
Best thing to do, is just build your own. Pick up an P60 through P200, slap in a good video card and 8 to 32M ram, and just hang that puppy of a super fast server, and you'll be much happier, and probably pay less, than buying anyones "Thin Client."
Re:Yay! Goooooo Slackware!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Gotta love that thread safe C library -- D'oh
Took my idea! Well maybe...
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Graymalkin
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Well probably not...but maybe they saw some of the notes scribbled in my notebooks. I've been working on a design for *nix based NC's for a few months. My idea is alot similar to theirs (booting from a flash ROM, more than a dumb terminal less than a PC). But I see a problem here, it's too damned expencive. I didn't see a white paper on this thing but they sure charge you up the ass for it. I could build my own box and only pay about 4-500$ each. I'm gonna keep working on my design because I have always enjoyed setting up slim/thin clients for people. I like central administration better than taking care of tons of PC's in an office.
For those of you who keep talking about fat clients with hard drives and floppies and such, remember that they are very expencive, in the short run they are cheaper, but in order to stay current and competitive with the rest of the business world you need to upgrade about every 20 months or so. If I have a thin client that will last me for 5-9 years (thats 500$ or 600 if you're bying a WYSE thin client and only once every 5-9 years excluding server upgrades which should be done every 3 years or so to keep up the speed) as opposed to 600$ every 20 months for PC's which muct be administered all the time (can we say overtime?) you start to see the TCO savings. With a thin client I need to upgrade the software on the server (probably Appliware or Star Office if it's a corporate office) which takes me a fraction of the time it takes me to upgrade dozens of PC's.
-- I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Re:Took my idea! Well maybe...
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Crass+Spektakel
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> For those of you who keep talking about fat > clients with hard drives and floppies > and such, remember that they are very expencive, > in the short run they are > cheaper, but in order to stay current and > competitive with the rest of the business > world you need to upgrade about every 20 > months or so.
Why do I need to upgrade a pc-based X-Terminal?
I am running a HP-Vecta 386sx16 with 8MB RAM and a 100MB Harddisk, build nearly ten years ago, for five years as a X-Terminal with X and linux. It wasn`t always blindingly fast, but good enough for running (displaying?) KDE, Netscape and StarOffice lately.
I really can`t see why I should upgrade the old Vectra, it good enough. And I wont change anything about it until it crumbles to dust. Ok, I might add, that I put up another X-Terminal some weeks ago, a 486dx4-160/32MB-RAM/300MB-Harddrive, but its much more intelligent and even somewhat independent from the server.
-- "Life is short and in most cases it ends with death."
Sir Sinclair
"Heat driven" means no moving parts
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
It probably relies on phase change.
When they first started putting pentiums into laptops, my office got one. Being an electronics tech, I naturally went crazy and took the damn thing apart. It was liquid cooled! The little pipes coming off the CPU led to a heat exchanger under the keyboard.
This machines are more expensive than PCs. $839-600... umm.
Okay, that's the initial price; the real savings come because you update those terminals every 9 years instead of every 9 months (as you would do with PCs). And, since you have everything centralized in a server, it's really easier to keep the software updated and properly set up.
But I still think that's very expensive.
If I buy PCs and set them up to behave just the same way the NCs and terminals do, is there anything the terminals will do that the PCs won't? Can't I still use the same client-server design, having the PCs act just like terminals? A PC is cheaper than this terminals but can do more things... is there anything that keeps me from setting it up to do all the things the terminals (NCs) do and more?
I know, it would be a pain to do with Windows, but I can't see any problems with this centralized design using PCs with Linux (or a BSD) and XWindows instead of NCs. If I find it really useful to keep the applications centralized in a powerful server, what keeps me from doing just that and using PCs as terminals?
So, in the end, PCs can do all the things NCs do, plus a lot more... and are (in this case) cheaper.
Alejo.
Re:Expensive? Cheap?
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Anonymous Coward
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You seem to forget that PC's are expensive to maintain, less reliable and more time consuming than NC's.
People who buy NC's don't buy them because they are cheap, they are brought because they are cheap to run.
If you read the article, you would have noticed that these devices seem to be well built and have few moving parts. There are no expensive, unreliable hard drives to maintain, no fans that collect dust and eventually fail, no floppy drives that are always a problem to keep running. No cdrom drives ppl get tempted to put their drinks on. (couldn't resist that)
Furthermore the are no(few) software problems. No driver problems, no confilicting hardware problems, no IRQ problems. These NC's just are what plug and play was supposed to be.
IF someones terminal eventually fails (hopefully not common), all you have to do is plug a new one in. This is the simplicity of these devices.
This is why NC's are attractive for some situations and why you shouldn't try to save a couple of hundred dollars buy substituting NC's using PC's. PC's will eventually cost much more to maintain than that NC.
Beau Kuiper
Re:Good ol' Slackware/Damn so old but had to rply
by
gavinhall
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· Score: 1
Posted by fR0993R-on-Atari-5200:
I meant MB as in MegaBytes and Mb/s as in Megabits per second. I believe I was correct with my capitalizations, perhaps not.
So, really, it'd be 50MB * 8Mb/1MB / 1Mb/sec = 400 seconds or about 6 and a half minutes of downloading. Not too much...
...but on the other hand...
it's a 486 that would be pretty slow at doing anything powerfull to require 20MB of HD space for bins and data, let alone 50.
Laters
fR0993R
..Linux needs 1/2Life...
Re:Flash memory? How?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Look at www.igel.de
Re:Viva La Slackware!
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Des+Herriott
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Oh well, perhaps I just miss the old days curled up in the green glow of a WYSE term hacking useless C progs for shits and giggles. Those where the days!
Ooh yes. Though I'm sure I remember them being amber. I also remember them having the nicest keyboards I've ever used.
Well, this looks like a really good system, because from the looks of this article, it looks like it is possible to play quake over this network, so I'm all in favour of it:) No 3dfx, but you can't have everything.
I know I always make every article relevant to quake, but in the big picture, thats what really matters.
"...the diminutive box is packed with ports, including Universal Serial Bus..."
I didn't think Linux USB was ready for prime time. Is WYSE jumping the gun with this announcement (i.e. vaporware) or have they made source mods that haven't been contributed back?
And speaking of which, is anyone checking up on these "embedded Linux" companies to make sure they are making the source available? -- "Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Why don't you do it if you want to play self-appointed security person?
--
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Re:USB?
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Anonymous Coward
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Discliamer: I am assuming that this is actually someone from the company, this could easily be very much not the case.
No worries, we put all the source on a CDROM that comes with the product.
Bzzt.
Sorry, but that's not good enough. the GPL requires that the source be available in *any* case. Being required to buy the item to get the source doesn't cut it.
Finally, someone making a linux based product NOT based on Redhat. PEASANTS REJOICE!
-- ---
Stampede linux for me!
I play with fire to break the ice..
Thanks!!! (relevant but slightly off-topic)
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kzinti
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Thanks for pointing to the "printer-friendly" form of this article, instead of the gaudy ad-crammed regular version. I find the cleaner text much easier to read. I'd love it if more Slashdot posters followed suit and pointed to printer friendly versions of articles where available.
--JT
Low maintenance turnkey solutions.
by
Codifex+Maximus
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· Score: 1
or so the article led me to believe. No harddrive, no floppy, few movable parts to wear out. Possibly the ideal terminal.
Time will tell... time will tell...
-- Codifex Maximus ~
In search of... a shorter sig.
Re:Low maintenance turnkey solutions.
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Foogle
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· Score: 1
I'll agree with you on the maintainance part - this machine looks pretty unlikely to break due to overuse.
At $600 in bulk, this things don't sound like a bargain. As much as I dislike the sub-$1000 PC market, it is there. Why would a company choose these machines over more versatile and powerful solutions like E-Machines, which run for about $800 w/monitor at 350 MHz?
Re:Not exactly a bargain
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Anonymous Coward
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Beacuse it's designed to last for five to seven years unlike the current PC machines which seem to be designed to last from five to seven months.
Well first of all 5 months is a little bit of an exaggeration. If you're replacing your machine every five months it's either (a) because you have money to burn or (b) because your work requires cutting edge technology, which most work does not.
And the only reason that regular PCs do have higher replacement rates than NCs is that they use local resources rather than remote ones, however there's no reason that a PC can't be used as an extra-functional NC.
Water cooled?? I want one.
by
mountain
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The computer uses a heat-driven water cooling system instead of a fan to cool...
Yum.. (I really have nothing more to say)
-- ---
"If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still
wrong?"
Anyone notice that they are booting off of a flash memory module? Is this hardware available to the Joe Public? I'd like to stick my kernel and a few tools onto an 8mb flash module for quick bootups as well?
I think you would need a flash module with an IDE or SCSI interface, so it just looked like another disc drive to the rest of the system. Anyone know someone who sells something like this?
...will cost less than $600 in high volumes, McNaught said,
emphasizing that the real cost savings come with lower installation and management costs.
As it says, it's not the initial cost that's important. It's the cost savings, over the useable life of the terminal..
...terminals that are inexpensive to buy, install, and maintain; that are centrally controlled; that have a life span of five to eight years...
...and how many of those E-Machines would you expect to last 5 years?
I'm not saying I agree/disagree (with the article or you). I just think you're taking the article out of context. You're trying to compare apples to oranges.
-- ---
"If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still
wrong?"
Jeez, if something happened and the cooling system broke... man, that would suck. Although, admittedly, it's a better long term solution (ideally) than a fan.
I used to work for a company that used a water cooled IBM mainframe. The coolant pumps were in the basement and the mf was on the ground floor. As you've probably guessed, one day one of the coolant pipes burst. 8] To make matters worse, it was on the output side of the pump and the low pressure cutoff failed. The pump emptied ALL the water into the basement in about 90 seconds. The final straw came when it was discovered that all the toner for city bus sized laser printer was stored directly on the basement floor next to the pump. "bad things, man!"
Java not the universal solution? :-)
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Nice to see some evidence against the "Java will control every device on Earth" hype from Mtn. View.
Well admittedly, none of the other popular distributions are exacly prone to crashing. And it's just as easy to customize them. The difference is that most of them come with their own little "preconfigurations", whereas slackware allows you the opportunity to do it yourself.
but you miss part of the point
by
cthonious
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Yes, they are a bit steep.
However, they do have nice things built in like a pc card reader.
They so much easier to manage than PC's, especially winblows PCs
They support a lot of protocols as well.
They probably use 1/100th the power of a normal ATX PC. The savings in costs here alone is justification for some people.
--
support gun control: take guns from cops
Network World never mentions Linux!
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bgarcia
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I just read an article in the June 14th Network World about the new Wyse terminal, and not once do they mention Linux. Sorry, I don't have a web link.
99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code, fix one bug, compile it again...
All distrib wars aside, I must say this is a big plus for Linux. I work in a shop that has tons of users running WP and terminal access programs on PII's with 128megs of RAM. It's nuts. Give me back the days when a user had a dumb term and all I had to worry about was whether or not it was plugged into the network or not! (Or just plugged in in the case of some users.) If your buying a PC to act as a dumb term, sooner than later someone gets the brilliant idea that they are more than dumb terms and start adding 'functionality' to get 'more bang out of their buck'. You start that and the next thing you know someone's complaining that they are too slow to do something you never ment them to do. (Duh!) So now you're upgrading. (To stay 'current'.) $800 for a PC is _not_ cheaper than a $600 term, not if you try to replace the PC every 3-4 years. Add that to service... on my home PC, I like to fix/upgrade things myself if/when they break, but at work, I've got better things to do than play Dr. with some useless NT box. (That's what vendors are for.:) If it's broke, swap the unit. End of story.
I'm ranting. The point is there is a place for thin clients, we just have to drop this whole "more is more" mentality on the grounds that it's too simple. We're missing something here.
Oh well, perhaps I just miss the old days curled up in the green glow of a WYSE term hacking useless C progs for shits and giggles. Those where the days!
Where did they arrive at that price point? The main point of thin clients is price. You can buy a full PC for that price.
I've been looking into building my own linux-based thin clients for distributed processing purposes. I priced all the needed parts for a very hefty machine at less than $300. Maybe they aren't going the x86 route?
SGI doom works on eXceed (PC X Server)
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
So it should work on a thin client as well.
Performance is actually quite good on a 100-Base-T network.
You can even scale the window to 2 or 3 times the size used on the original PC version and really strain the network.
Deployed an SGI based GIS on an SGI server and used PC's as the clients (a lot cheaper than SGI workstations!) and used SGI-doom as one of my network throughput tests. Yes I know there are better ways, but they are no where near as fun....
BTW suprised in that using a 100-Base-T switched network, the network is not the only bottle neck. An old Pentium 200 w. a matrox graphics card was almost twice as slow as a new (at the time) 300 Mhz PII w. permedia2 based graphics ( bothe computers had the same network card, other dif was 95 on the p200 vs. NT on PII.)
Would have used Linux as our X terms, but users love, love, love those ms apps.....
Slashdot Mirror
Does any one else find it ironic that one of the adverts above and below the article is for Windows Beta 3? If you are interested in a Linux thin client you certainly are not looking for an unfinished bloatware desktop which you get to pay to find bugs in.
Well I thought it was ironic.
Granted, thin clients are clients, and not stand-alone devices, but the first poster has a point: Why pay $800 for a box that is essentially a processor, memory, monitor and keyboard, when a fully-functional box with a CD drive and a massive hard drive can be had for far less?
... diskless / floppy-less workstations, bootable over a network and designed for easy administration / uniformity in corporate environments.
Dell talked about selling something similar (though that was 2 / 2.5 yrs ago), but it would have run Windows, because Dell hadn't wised up to Linux at that point. I don't think they ever really got made, but the concept is the same as these WYSE terminals
I asked the same question then (working for an ad agency and thereby for Dell) and still have never gotten a really good answer why it would be better to pay more for fewer / lesser components. If I can get a PII with 64MB of RAM, an 8GB hard drive, a 15" monitor and a NIC for $600 (realistic? too conservative? too hopeful?) right now, I could use the hard drive, floppy drive and CD drive for target practice at a shooting range for far less than the privelege of having someone sell me a processor / memory / NIC / monitor combo. And that counts range time.
Is there some aspect to this that I just don't get? What justifies the cost of these things? Getting hundreds of computers custom built, these days, is no big deal -- and you don't have to specify any naughty security / administrative hassles you don't want, right?
Corrections appreciated,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Wrong, the reason for NCs is the cost - not the (purchase) price. It is all to do with Total Cost of Ownership over the lifetime of the unit. PCs in corporate environments, even used as glorified NCs still cost too much. That's without taking into account their power consumption etc.
Read the GPL section 3 sub a. You may as well read the rest of section 3, too. They can do this.
Posted by fR0993R-on-Atari-5200:
For once Slackware is put into the lime-light it deserves. It is IMNSHO the most effic^H^H^H^H^H compact distro out so far.
I made my own "thin client" w/ Slacky: a 486/33 with a 204MB HD. I had Slack 4.0, complete Netscape, and all tcp/ip utils running with 50MB of room for userspace and a 10MB swap. Gets ~1Mb/s thru-put off of the wcarchive through our cable modem network. Not bad for obsolete hardware!
At no point does the message say you are *required* to buy the product to get the source.
I'm glad someone is asking this question. It has bothered me for a while that IGEL, an innovative linux thin-client company, charges about $800 for the source distribution. Of course, all that they have done is add a few of their own drivers to a standard linux distro, but they have not put the source back out in the way that everyone else plays the game. Their page on their software describes linux features (multi-tasking, etc.) as if they invented it, and as if that is what one is paying $800 for! I checked their site (http://www.igel.de/indexe.htm) before writing this and it appears that now they have dropped the option of obtaining software completely. Now one can just buy their flashcards. This doesn't exactly help to advance linux as a thin client solution ...
Does anyone know anything about the diskless workstation cards offered by lsl (http://www.lsl.com/catalog/hardware/dlwksta/index .htm)? They list at $90 (!). The maker is "Dynamic Results", but no homepage is given...
That's the same with an OS, and isn't linux specific.
So it takes you back to the old, "wich is more explotable; M$ or Linux" argument.
The USB hardware spec is FIRM. So they can buld that into the box. Only the software needs work, and after they get it going, because the OS is flashable, they can update it.
End of Story.
You could make a really cool Beowulf Cluster from these things!!!!
Sorry, had to do it.
Fog
--Half-Life means I have no Life--
Actually, the unit doesn't have enough flash memory to fit all of Quake (Quake needs 50 megs or so), but it would be possible to have this unit run Doom or Heretic (~15 megs) if everything else is deleted.
No worries, we put all the source on a CDROM that comes with the product.
Although your argument is flawlessly correct, the point is that it's a bad idea. Java NCs are just as bad (arguably worse) than these WYSE terminals. Either way you're going to have terminals sitting around with outdated flashware. The fact that it would be the same with JVM doesn't make the Linux solution any better.
$800+ for a box that can't beat a $600 box.
I can go to my PC vendor down the street and have them built me 100 boxes that don't have an HD, or much RAM, and boot from a network.
NC's suck. Haven't we learned our lessons from the X-Terminal days?
The best terminal is a computer which can shift computing from client to server as needed, not one that is hardwired.
I don't know how Wyse does it, but the Netwinder boots directly from a 1M flash chip, mapped as ROM rather than as a disk drive. The flash contains a small (~64k) boot loader + debugger and a compressed Linux kernel, and can also contain a compressed initrd image (handy for some 'rescue' situations where you've trashed your hard drive; with 1M flash there's only room for a couple of utilities).
The one thing that concerns me about embedded linux boxes like this is what happens when 3 months down the road someone finds a DoS for the kernel thats installed on these boxes. Even if its flashable, chances are there will be more boxes left un-upgraded than there will be maintainted boxes. I hope this doesnt turn a feature (open source) of linux into a fault.
God Fucking Damnit
It's a Cyrix Media GX (up to a 200Mhz in their 5355). Granted, it is a bit expensive, but at least it isn't an NCD overpriced WinCE toy.
:)
Anything is better than WindowsCE for thin-client workstations. If it runs linux, all the better. The largest problem of course: Citrix 3.x ICA client (no seemless windows) and no RDP support. It's a better X than NCD's cludge.
The client can be started from memory (flash), but at least the last time I talked with a Wyse rep, it does require a memory upgrade of the box to 16M of RAM. The other cost is the PCMCIA "root" filesystem - those memory cards aren't cheap.
Same thing goes for Netier. They use up to a 300Mhz Cyrix MediaGX machine as well - with harddrive/floppy/pci and other neat goodies as options. It shouldn't be hard to get one of them to run Linux either. Imagine a beowulf cluster made out of those tiny little things.
Still waiting for other neat ports (like StrongARM to the HP Joranada 820), or ANY other *normal* WindowsCE platform that would fight for market share. What would you rather be running on your palmtop?
NC's are NOT for people like you who can go down to your local shrink wrap store and buy 100's of PC's without hard drives. NC's are for IT people who don't have the time and/or the money to setup, configure and maintain thousands of full blown PC's across a corporation.
Same situation, really.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
First of all I don't know anything about games, I don't play them. But that doesn't mean you can't run a big game on a thin client.
You run the game on the server you connect to, not the thin client. The client only runs X. And OpenGL might be in XFree86 4.0, so if they wait for that, and used it, it would probably really rock.
My work on thin clients has shown me that there are even some preformance gains IF you configure your thin client right. The thin client's CPU and RAM only runs X, and you want a rocking video card (From my experiance doing molecular modeling and such). But, your bottle neck is bandwidth, not video or ram. All the background calculations to tell the video unit what to render are done on the server, if the server is fast, that will be fast. If the thin client has a good video subsystem, it will render the graphics fast. Since the thin client has it's own CPU, and if the video unit is fast, it has the potential to blow away a "complete system" because one box does video, and one does the application, and your not bogging down any one system by doing both on it.
The problems are, 1) you piss off other users that are on that server. 2) you frequently find the bottleneck is the data transfer rate between the server and the thin client (espically on 10baseT or less) 3) Most thin clients just don't have really rocking video subsystems.
Now, at home, I have a Linux box that I call a "server" in a generic sence, that is basically my workstation. I also have a lesser linux box (good video, good monitor, 32M RAM, MilleniumII vid card), that I run just as a thin client off the server. I have found that some applications (particularly that use a lot of CPU time for the application, AND a lot of CPU time for X) are much faster on the thin client.
Best thing to do, is just build your own. Pick up an P60 through P200, slap in a good video card and 8 to 32M ram, and just hang that puppy of a super fast server, and you'll be much happier, and probably pay less, than buying anyones "Thin Client."
Gotta love that thread safe C library -- D'oh
Well probably not...but maybe they saw some of the notes scribbled in my notebooks. I've been working on a design for *nix based NC's for a few months. My idea is alot similar to theirs (booting from a flash ROM, more than a dumb terminal less than a PC). But I see a problem here, it's too damned expencive. I didn't see a white paper on this thing but they sure charge you up the ass for it. I could build my own box and only pay about 4-500$ each. I'm gonna keep working on my design because I have always enjoyed setting up slim/thin clients for people. I like central administration better than taking care of tons of PC's in an office.
For those of you who keep talking about fat clients with hard drives and floppies and such, remember that they are very expencive, in the short run they are cheaper, but in order to stay current and competitive with the rest of the business world you need to upgrade about every 20 months or so. If I have a thin client that will last me for 5-9 years (thats 500$ or 600 if you're bying a WYSE thin client and only once every 5-9 years excluding server upgrades which should be done every 3 years or so to keep up the speed) as opposed to 600$ every 20 months for PC's which muct be administered all the time (can we say overtime?) you start to see the TCO savings. With a thin client I need to upgrade the software on the server (probably Appliware or Star Office if it's a corporate office) which takes me a fraction of the time it takes me to upgrade dozens of PC's.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
It probably relies on phase change.
When they first started putting pentiums into laptops, my office got one. Being an electronics tech, I naturally went crazy and took the damn thing apart. It was liquid cooled! The little pipes coming off the CPU led to a heat exchanger under the keyboard.
I imagine some laptops still use this technology.
I was wondering...
This machines are more expensive than PCs. $839-600... umm.
Okay, that's the initial price; the real savings come because you update those terminals every 9 years instead of every 9 months (as you would do with PCs). And, since you have everything centralized in a server, it's really easier to keep the software updated and properly set up.
But I still think that's very expensive.
If I buy PCs and set them up to behave just the same way the NCs and terminals do, is there anything the terminals will do that the PCs won't? Can't I still use the same client-server design, having the PCs act just like terminals? A PC is cheaper than this terminals but can do more things... is there anything that keeps me from setting it up to do all the things the terminals (NCs) do and more?
I know, it would be a pain to do with Windows, but I can't see any problems with this centralized design using PCs with Linux (or a BSD) and XWindows instead of NCs. If I find it really useful to keep the applications centralized in a powerful server, what keeps me from doing just that and using PCs as terminals?
So, in the end, PCs can do all the things NCs do, plus a lot more... and are (in this case) cheaper.
Alejo.
Posted by fR0993R-on-Atari-5200:
I meant MB as in MegaBytes and Mb/s as in Megabits
per second. I believe I was correct with my
capitalizations, perhaps not.
So, really, it'd be 50MB * 8Mb/1MB / 1Mb/sec = 400 seconds or about 6 and a half minutes of
downloading. Not too much...
...but on the other hand...
it's a 486 that would be pretty slow at doing anything
powerfull to require 20MB of HD space for bins
and data, let alone 50.
Laters
fR0993R
..Linux needs 1/2Life...
Look at www.igel.de
Ooh yes. Though I'm sure I remember them being amber. I also remember them having the nicest keyboards I've ever used.
Well, this looks like a really good system, because from the looks of this article, it looks like it is possible to play quake over this network, so I'm all in favour of it :) No 3dfx, but you can't have everything.
I know I always make every article relevant to quake, but in the big picture, thats what really matters.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
"...the diminutive box is packed with ports, including Universal Serial Bus..."
I didn't think Linux USB was ready for prime time. Is WYSE jumping the gun with this announcement (i.e. vaporware) or have they made source mods that haven't been contributed back?
And speaking of which, is anyone checking up on these "embedded Linux" companies to make sure they are making the source available?
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Finally, someone making a linux based product NOT based on Redhat. PEASANTS REJOICE!
--- Stampede linux for me! I play with fire to break the ice..
Thanks for pointing to the "printer-friendly" form of this article, instead of the gaudy ad-crammed regular version. I find the cleaner text much easier to read. I'd love it if more Slashdot posters followed suit and pointed to printer friendly versions of articles where available.
--JT
or so the article led me to believe. No harddrive, no floppy, few movable parts to wear out. Possibly the ideal terminal.
Time will tell... time will tell...
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
At $600 in bulk, this things don't sound like a bargain. As much as I dislike the sub-$1000 PC market, it is there. Why would a company choose these machines over more versatile and powerful solutions like E-Machines, which run for about $800 w/monitor at 350 MHz?
Yum.. (I really have nothing more to say)
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
Anyone notice that they are booting off of a flash memory module? Is this hardware available to the Joe Public? I'd like to stick my kernel and a few tools onto an 8mb flash module for quick bootups as well?
I think you would need a flash module with an IDE or SCSI interface, so it just looked like another disc drive to the rest of the system. Anyone know someone who sells something like this?
As it says, it's not the initial cost that's important. It's the cost savings, over the useable life of the terminal..
...and how many of those E-Machines would you expect to last 5 years?
I'm not saying I agree/disagree (with the article or you). I just think you're taking the article out of context. You're trying to compare apples to oranges.
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
Jeez, if something happened and the cooling system broke... man, that would suck. Although, admittedly, it's a better long term solution (ideally) than a fan.
Nice to see some evidence against the "Java will
control every device on Earth" hype from Mtn. View.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
"Why don't you do it if you want to play self-appointed security person?"
What on earth are you talking about? I'm not playing self-appointed anything, I'm asking a question.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Slackware is great. Highly customisable and rock solid!
Skip
--------------------
flifson@csdotuctdotacdotza
Skip
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"To create an apple pie from scratch,
you first must create the universe."
Yes, they are a bit steep.
However, they do have nice things built in like a pc card reader.
They so much easier to manage than PC's, especially winblows PCs
They support a lot of protocols as well.
They probably use 1/100th the power of a normal ATX PC. The savings in costs here alone is justification for some people.
support gun control: take guns from cops
I just read an article in the June 14th Network World about the new Wyse terminal, and not once do they mention Linux. Sorry, I don't have a web link.
99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again...
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
All distrib wars aside, I must say this is a big plus for Linux. I work in a shop that has tons of users running WP and terminal access programs on PII's with 128megs of RAM. It's nuts. Give me back the days when a user had a dumb term and all I had to worry about was whether or not it was plugged into the network or not! (Or just plugged in in the case of some users.) If your buying a PC to act as a dumb term, sooner than later someone gets the brilliant idea that they are more than dumb terms and start adding 'functionality' to get 'more bang out of their buck'. You start that and the next thing you know someone's complaining that they are too slow to do something you never ment them to do. (Duh!) So now you're upgrading. (To stay 'current'.) $800 for a PC is _not_ cheaper than a $600 term, not if you try to replace the PC every 3-4 years. Add that to service... on my home PC, I like to fix/upgrade things myself if/when they break, but at work, I've got better things to do than play Dr. with some useless NT box. (That's what vendors are for. :) If it's broke, swap the unit. End of story.
I'm ranting. The point is there is a place for thin clients, we just have to drop this whole "more is more" mentality on the grounds that it's too simple. We're missing something here.
Oh well, perhaps I just miss the old days curled up in the green glow of a WYSE term hacking useless C progs for shits and giggles. Those where the days!
Where did they arrive at that price point? The main point of thin clients is price. You can buy a full PC for that price.
I've been looking into building my own linux-based thin clients for distributed processing purposes. I priced all the needed parts for a very hefty machine at less than $300. Maybe they aren't going the x86 route?
-- Virtual Windows Project
So it should work on a thin client as well.
Performance is actually quite good on a 100-Base-T network.
You can even scale the window to 2 or 3 times the size used on the original PC version and really strain the network.
Deployed an SGI based GIS on an SGI server and used PC's as the clients (a lot cheaper than SGI workstations!) and used SGI-doom as one of my network throughput tests. Yes I know there are better ways, but they are no where near as fun....
BTW suprised in that using a 100-Base-T switched network, the network is not the only bottle neck. An old Pentium 200 w. a matrox graphics card was almost twice as slow as a new (at the time) 300 Mhz PII w. permedia2 based graphics ( bothe computers had the same network card, other dif was 95 on the p200 vs. NT on PII.)
Would have used Linux as our X terms, but users love, love, love those ms apps.....
motjuste@briefcase.com
Will they come with the "live, streaming slack" logo plastered on the front?
support gun control: take guns from cops