Re: Dumb terminals possible with i386 Debian
On Tue, Oct 22, 2002 at 09:04:37AM -0800, Andy wrote:
> On Monday 21 October 2002 22:36, Tom Cook wrote:
> > Andy <list@firman.us> wrote:
> > > Thin client technology....isn't that what you are talking about?
> > >
> > > I have always wondered.............why can't Linux (especially Debian
> > > Linux) do the same thing Citrix is doing?
> >
> > Citrix essentially does what X does a lot less efficiently. X is
> > pretty much the best thin client technology around. Why would you
> > want metaframe?
>
> I don't want Metaframe. I want to know if the same thing can be done
> with Linux (especially Debian).
> What he had was Win2000 with Citrix serving 20 thin client terminals in a town
> 300 miles away over broadband. These little terminals are manufactured in
> Taiwan and I can't find the company. They had a little slot in which to
> stick a little ATM like flash card in order to logon. No moving parts at all
> in this little unit. You simply plug in a keyboard, monitor, mouse, power,
> and ethernet, then your little flash card, and you get a Windows screen
> in which to run all of the Office applications, email and web, from the main
> windows server in the other town.
>
> Thin client boxes are attractive since one does not have to deal with
> old hardware, failing memory, flaky video cards, hard drives, etc....
>
> I want to build a Debian server and be able to serve 50-100 thin clients over
> a 100Mbps LAN. I can build the server but I am at a loss on how to get a
> thin client running this way.
>
> Anyone doing this with Debian?
I think I have heard about this before. The flash card acts as an authentication
token and the box is simply a device with a low power CPU (don't remember the model)
as well as memory. It runs everything off the server. Since everything runs off the
server, you can simply disconnect one session and when you connect from anywhere else
you get your desktop back just the way you left it, the server keeps track of the state
of the desktop. They were still connected to the network although I think it was only
10bT rather than 100.
You can do something similar with a Debian server and a bunch of terminals. The terminals
can be old 486 and Pentium boxes with a CPU and memory. They just need enough resources
to run an X Server. Although a hard drive isn't necessary it comes in handy for caching.
You can check out Linux Terminal Server project like someone else mentioned and look
at some of the How-To's that another poster listed for the thin clients.
The only thing is that I don't know of you can maintain state from one session to another
with this setup. I remember that when I log out of KDE it asks if I want to keep these
settings for next time but if you simply disconnected rather than logging out I think
you get a new desktop rather than the one you had before.
Hope this helps.
Kourosh
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