LTSP, DietPC, ThinStation, Damned Small Linux (DSL), and a variety of other distributions are all similar implementations of the thin client concept. I've tried the majority of them with my thin clients. While none of them (including LTSP) is exactly what I need in my environment, LTSP comes closest to what I'm looking for.
What I like about LTSP is that it's a bit more extensible than many of the others, through both the screens.d scripts and through LBE. In my lab, I have a bunch of thin clients that were originally designed to run as embedded clients. What I'd really like is an embedded client with a few features (X, Xfce4, Firefox, perhaps GAIM) that runs from the flash on the thin client, but after building an embedded distribution and trying it out, the clients simply don't have the horsepower to support the architecture well. So rather than fight that, I've been running LTSP in the lab for a long while now. To support my ~50 thin clients, I just had to properly scale my servers that run LTSP. I think I decided on 15 thin clients per server (servers are dual Xeon with 2GB RAM that also serve things other than just thin clients.) The servers maintain maintain a decent throughput ratio, so it's all pretty stable. What I didn't like about some of the other embedded/thin client architectures was the software tended to be VERY out of date. Some distributions are still running 2.2 kernels with some odd subsets of RedHat 6 and 7 software. Even on a thin client, this is far too behind for my environment. LTSP is at least somewhat current with regard to packages, and it's getting better. By compiling it using LBE, I can apply updated packages - if required - to suit my needs. While the LBE is by no way perfect (Jim did a great job with it, but admittedly he understands it's not the right way to do things) it is somewhat simple and it's capable of targeting different architectures to support those sites that may have PPC, Sparc, or other boxes laying around as spares. Richard Bos said: > Does anyone have experience with 'diet pc', just curious why one would > like to > use diet-pc instead of ltsp. http://diet-pc.sourceforge.net/ > There should be a good reason to have that project as well, but I don't > know > which one yet. > > -- > Richard Bos > Without a home the journey is endless > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide > Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. > Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. > http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click > _____________________________________________________________________ > Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss > For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net > ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
