what are you using for TC's

[William Fragakis]

Barry,
A  couple of things -
1- Intel's Atom is a game changer for TCs. I was able to get a handful
of MSI Wind barebones open box from Newegg for under $100. I only needed
to add a stick of memory. As the essential hardware is the core of much
of the netbook market (1.6 ghz Atom and Intel 945 video), these can act
as thin, skinny or fat clients for all but the most demanding tasks.
While they may not be in your budget at this price, what it means, going
forward is that the price of new hardware for clients will become
decreasingly a factor in the overall cost of a desktop infrastructure.
If you add what is happening with AMD and with ARM processors, I'd be
willing to say that client computing will get quickly fatter over the
next several years.

2- I've not had the opportunity to test it but I've heard that FreeNX,
as much as I absolutely love it, doesn't scale well. You may want to see
if you can get 20 instances running on a server without significant lag
before you commit to that direction. For a couple of clients, it can
really help, though. I used to use it on a P! 166 laptop that was
running FreeNX over wireless and the performance was surprisingly good.

Regards,
William





On Mon, 2009-12-07 at 12:00 -0500,
k12linux-devel-list-request at redhat.com wrote:
> Date: Sun, 06 Dec 2009 15:51:50 -0600
> From: Barry  Cisna <brcisna at eazylivin.net>
> Subject: what are you using for TC's
> To: k12linux-devel-list at redhat.com
> Message-ID: <1260136310.7369.58.camel at localhost.localdomain>
> Content-Type: text/plain
> 
> Hello All,
> 
> Just curious as to what some of you are using for TC's these days with
> ltsp5x? I am in the process of setting up my first f10-k12linux server
> (for my home use). We are using Centos5 still at school ,as well as
> what
> I am running at home for the tribe to thrash on,,:) I am about a year
> or
> more behind on doing this I know,but I am finding the ltsp5.x is going
> to render my poor little Ebox2300 useless. I have read on the k12linux
> wiki were most of the HPtx series are mostly done,as well. 
> I have been doing some research into this and found that(with the same
> hardware), when booting a client,I do a network restart on the server
> before ,to clear the nics rx/tx figures,, that with ltsp4.x eth0 TX's
> about 65MB of data. On the ltsp5.x server the eth0/ltspbr0 TX's over
> 360MB's of data. This is just to get the client to a logged in
> desktop.
> My Ebox takes about 45-60 secs to get to a login with ltsp4.x and with
> ltsp5.x it takes about 3-4 mins. I did switch out the switch in
> between
> my server and the TC (upstairs/downstairs setup), to a gig switch
> thinking this may help a tiny bit even with the TC nic being a 100mb.
> It
> made no difference.
>  Whats odd is I can have both severs running side by side,,have the
> Ebox
> boot from the Centos5 server then nx-client to the f10 server and web
> browsing is as fast as if you were on a latest greatest machine of any
> configuration. Of course this isn't practical but just saying.
> Anyway just posting some of what I have found in the last few days
> trialing f10 k12linux,,:)
> Sorry for the long post!
> 
> Take Care,
> Barry Cisna