[TriLUG] Xubuntu for Thin Clients

[James McDermott]

Owen,

I am also someone who has never setup or used LTSP. 

At the last TriLUG meeting, Jason Tower gave a great presentation and
demo on LTSP. 

Jason mentioned that all the applications executed on the server that
was running Ubuntu or maybe Edubuntu. 

I think the P2 thin-clients required no OS and could work without hard
drives installed on the machines. This is ideal for us because we have
lots of donated P2's at the shop. 

You have a good point! Maybe Xubuntu is advertised as a good thin-client
network OS where the server is actually running Xubuntu? 

Xubuntu, with its lightweight graphics, (compared with GNOME) probably
creates much lower screen refresh traffic across the network. This is
just a guess..

For my initial setup, I am planning on installing Edubuntu on the P4
server and will use P2 machines with no hard drives for my clients. 

We are interested in Edubuntu because it's aimed at kids and education.

Thanks, Jim   

On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 12:54 -0400, Owen Berry wrote:
> As someone who's never setup or even used LTSP before I'm just going to
> take a shot in the dark on this one ... aren't they saying that Xubuntu
> is a good client to be pulled from the central server and executed on
> the client because it's relatively lightweight.
> 
> Owen
> 
> On Thu, Sep 21, 2006 at 10:47:45PM -0400, James McDermott wrote:
> > Hello All,
> > 
> > We are starting to build a small thin-client demo network for a
> > classroom environment. 
> > 
> > The recommended requirements for the thin-client computer is a 300 MHz
> > P2 with 64 MB RAM and a 4MB display card. The thin-client computer can
> > run with no hard drive on the machine.  
> >  
> > Xubuntu is advertised as a good OS for thin-clients?
> > 
> > I am wondering why we should have an OS installed on our thin-clients? I
> > speculate that maybe this gives us the ability to reboot the thin-client
> > machines into a Xubuntu session if the server was down? 
> > 
> > If the server is down, will the thin-client try to boot to the network
> > (fail) and then automatically boot from the hard drive (assuming the
> > correct boot order is set in BIOS)? 
> > 
> > Does PXE enabled NIC booting or booting using a etherboot floppy require
> > that the machine have an installed OS?
> > 
> > Our server will be a P4 running Edubuntu.
> > 
> > If you have any thoughts about why we should install an OS like Xubuntu
> > in the P2 thin-clients, please advise. 
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > 
> > Jim McDermott