Re: [PLUG] Thin vs. Slim Clients?

[Kevin Brosius <kbrosius@kns.com>]

"W. Chris Shank" wrote:
> 
> Question:
> 
> I'm looking at the Linux Terminal Server project and have setup a test
> environment. It looks pretty cool, but it seems that the Thin Client is
> hardly doing any work. from what i can tell, it boots only enough to get X
> running and then turns over control to X on the server. What if the end user


X running...X on the server... This is rather confusing and doesn't
express how X windows runs very well.

You generally need a local X server to display application windows. 
That is the only 'server' you need to run.  X applications can then be
run either local or remote.  They connect to the X windows server to
display their output windows.  The window manager is really just another
X application with the additional role of supervising application window
layout.  (And maybe some other things.  So the window manager can run on
either the local machine or a remote machine just like other
applications.)


> wants to listen to music, use the cd rom, or floppy disk? i'm thinking that


Generally, X applications have access to hardware on the machine they
are run from.  Unless you have another service (someone mention NAS?)
forwarding the device, like a sound device, the applications can only
access hardware on the machine they run on, not on the machine with
their application window (and the X server).


> the better solution would be to make a slim client (a term i just invented,
> AFAIK) - like the Sun computer labs I used in college. each workstation had
> a boot OS, but mounted /home, /usr, etc over the network. How would this
> compare with the performance of the thin client? say the machine was a P133
> with 64M of ram. Is it too much overhead to have KDE3 running locally? Is
> there any way to get a better hybrid of LTSP and local fucntionality (sound,
> cd, floppy, etc).
> 
> what are your experiences?
> 
> thanks

-- 
Kevin Brosius
_________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group        --       http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug