On Sat, 20 Mar 2004 06:37, Jason Greenwood wrote: > Ok guys, here's your chance. You tell me the very best way to do what I > want to do and we'll most likely do it! I am looking for hardware input > mainly as we are employing Paul William to help us deploy the eventual > software and solution. > > Want to run a 2 person office on Linux (with a view to adding 2-4 staff > later). Would like to run attractive, modern thin clients on the > desktop. Thin client ideas? 3 Possibilities
1) mini-ITX boxes. Take care with the cases. Some of them are devoid of any aesthetic appeal whatsoever. http://www.mini-itx.com/ > They don't have to be ultra cheap (since we > could buy used lower spec'd desktops to do the job 2) Used machines used as X terminals in an LTSP network. The is the route I'd take. There are some quite nice 3 yo machines available now which work perfectly as terminals in an LTSP environment. Buy half a dozen for the price of 1 new machine. ( Slight exaggeration, but not by much ) http://www.ltsp.org/ http://www.k12ltsp.org/ 3) Buy new commercial X terminals. This is probably the route to take if you want to blow dough to make a splash. > but we are always > conscious of budget of course. We know what sort of sever specs we're > after but we also want to be as 'wireless' as possible, from Internet > access to printing to anything else we can make wireless! I HATE wiring. > =) It's so old school anyway... any wireless stories/deployments greatly > appreciated here. Remember that wireless is semi public. I know there are encryption methods but they will be cracked given time. Slow too. Like going back to the old 10MHz days. Frankly imho, not really fast enough to send complicated X traffic over. > [ ,, Flat panels .. ] > We'll of course be running a Linux firewall and file server Not in the same machine I hope. > and maybe even an IMAP server for mail anywhere since my hosting > company has caps on IMAP storage AFAIK. Squirrel mail looks nice. > I look forward to hearing from you all. I want to be a shining example > of what a small Linux based office CAN be. The key here is style I > guess. The gear needs to look nice as there will be business associates > coming to the office and they WILL be basing part of their opinion of us > on the gear we run. I would avoid the traditional word processor such as OpenOffice, and use LyX instead. It produces a _far_ nicer printed page. Get a really nice PostScript printer, you will be judged by the quality of the work that goes out in the post. I'm sure Fuji-Xerox will have something appropriate. -- Sincerely etc. Christopher Sawtell NB. This PC runs Linux. If you find a virus apparently from me, it has forged the e-mail headers on someone else's machine. Please do not notify me when this occurs. Thanks.
