[K12OSN] "thick" client for now, thin client later...

[Jim Anderson]

On Fri, 2004-02-20 at 18:18, Richard K. Ingalls wrote:
> My school may be getting a grant for two mini 
> labs: 10 student PCs + Teacher PC + all the 
> trimmings (smartboard, etc.).  The catch is that 
> the teachers will be getting training that will 
> come only in the form of Microsoft Office and 
> Windows XP + Inspiration.
> 
> My goal is to purchase hardware that makes it 
> possible for me to switch these mini-labs into 
> K12LTSP labs when our grant/project is expired. 
> I'll get teacher PCs that are powerful enough to 
> be servers.  The question is the student PCs...
> 
> I really want to have *very* small form factor PCs 
> for the clients.  But, they will have to support a 
> hard drive and CD-ROM  when they're running in 
> Windows mode.
> 
> I've been thinking of simply buying refurbished 
> Dell Optiplexes (which I've done before).  BUT, I 
> lose all the benefits of a true thin client (space 
> saving, energy saving, noise reducing).
> 
> Any suggestions?

Some Optiplex variants come with a LANdesk agent that will boot from the
network.  I'm not sure if they are capable of booting LTSP.  The ones
with LANdesk are id'd by an "EM" at bootup (as in GXa 266 EM+).  The
other problem is that you would have to switch the bootup sequence in
BIOS between LANdesk and the hard disk.  I believe you can force a
bootup menu on Optiplexes by hitting ESC during the boot sequence.

An alternative is to have thin clients booting to LTSP and then
accessing a Windows Terminal Server session using rdesktop for the
Windows apps.  Cost of the Win TS licensing will be a factor here.

A possible solution, if you already have PCs with Windows on them, is to
set up a client to access the Linux TS from a Windows client session. 
You'd have to do some looking around to see how this can be done.  Of
course you could aways just have a Windows PC set up in the Linux lab if
it is only the teacher who needs certain apps, and even that computer
can run OpenOffice for consistency.

-- 
Jim Anderson

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