[PLUG] Thin vs. Slim Clients?

["W. Chris Shank" <chris.shank@acetechgroup.com>]

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

_________________________________________________________________________
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