<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.3.2"> </HEAD> <BODY> On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 15:41 -0400, Joseph Bishay wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <PRE> I should have probably specified what our lab setup currently is: - server - ASUS p4p800 P4 3.2 Ghz 2 GIG RAM with SCSI 2x36 GB drives in RAID 1 with an intel gigabit network card for the clients - we have a total of 12 clients connected to the server, almost all of them with the same intel gigabit network cards, connected through a rankmount dlink 24 port switch. The clients are all pentium I machines with 16 or 32 MB of ram. thanks. Joseph </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> They can be 486's for all LTSP cares. There are four things that matter on the clients. They are the following: 1.) 32MB DRAM. More obviously doesn't hurt, but I've found that it is not at all necessary. 16MB, though, is kidding yourself; bump it up. 2.) Decent video cards. I use ATI 3D Rage Pro's (e. g. Xpert 98); they're cheap and awesome. S3 Trio64's (e. g. the venerable Diamond Stealth64) also work decently. The one I'm using to type this email (Pentium II/233) uses a Matrox Millenium G400 AGP. Overkill, true, but boy, is this client fast! 3.) Sound cards that are actually *FULLY* LTSP-compatible. Leave crap like those ESS AudioDrives alone; the sound quality is absolutely horrid. I have found that both the SoundBlaster 16 and SoundBlaster AWE32 (yes, the old ISA cards) are wonderful. Simply wonderful. Equally so are the Ensoniq AudioPCI cards (the client I'm using right now has one, and I love it), including the Creative Ensoniq. Any of these are dirt-cheap on PriceWatch; grab 'em if you see 'em. BTW, sound works great with KDE, too. :-) 4.) 100Mbps, Full Duplex autonegotiating, network cards on the client. You're already using Gig-E cards, so this obviously isn't an issue. :-) That's about it. Real World Example (TM) here. My friend's 32MB Pentium-120, formerly a Windows NT Workstation 3.51 box (yes, the box is that old), is now a LTSP client; I also built them a small K12LTSP 4.2.1 server to use with it and two more clients I gave 'em. I pulled out his ancient, vintage 1995, ATI Mach64 card (D-A-W-G S-L-O-W) and dropped a generic S3 Trio64V2 card in, stuck a 3Com 3c905 NIC in (he already had a SoundBlaster 16 present), and boy, is it sweet. He and his four-year-old son love that Pentium-120 now ("Fedowwa is neeet!"). --TP </BODY> </HTML>