Re: [PLUG] Thin vs. Slim Clients?

["W. Chris Shank" <chris.shank@acetechgroup.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.

i didn't state that well. what is happengin is that the diskless client
boots off the network, and starts X. It then connects to the X client
running on teh central server, so a GDM login is displayed. When you login,
it is EXACTLY like sitting at the server and loggin in directly. if i hit
reboot, the server reboots. if i hit eject cdrom, the server's cdrom ejects,
etc.

what i'd like to setup is a minimal local OS (or boot of the net is ok, but
use a local swap partition, and local /dev and /mnt. /home and /usr would be
mounted over the network.

i think this is probably similar to the sunFire 1 (i think that was the name
of it) which was Sun's thin client product. the kool thinkg abnout the
sunfire 1 was that you could kill a thin client then go to another thin
client and login and get EXACTLY where you were before, all windows open and
everything. i don't remember if it had CDROMS, but it did have sound. i
thought it was a very kool product, but expensive.





> 
> 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
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