On Tue, 5 Feb 2013, John Francis wrote:

Given the lack of traffic on this list and the distinct lack of interest from 
Oracle in supporting SRSS in a modern
multi-seat desktop environment (i.e. RHEL or OEL 6), it stands to reason that 
some people have found some nice alternatives.
What's the current state of the art with Linux desktop virtualisation? What I'm 
interested in particularly is:

- Really thin, minimalist clients

How thin is thin? As far as I understand, a modern Sun Ray DTU firmware is ~1 MiB. The IGEL Universal Desktop firmware is a lot bigger, perhaps 300 MiB or so, but does it really matter? The flash size of modern thin terminals is at least 1 GiB nowadays. The price for 1 GiB flash is about 5 bucks.

We all know that running a local operating system such as Windows 7 or local applications such as Web Browsers is not "thin" and should be avoided if you want to go thin, but by avoiding extremely minimal devices, you actually get a lot of features and flexibility.

There's a lot of buzz about "Zero Clients" nowadays. It is often claimed that they have "no operating system" and "no CPU". This is a myth. No computer can run without a CPU, and there must be at least some minimal system software. A Zero Client firwmares are 10 MiB or more. The HP t310 Zero Client has a 256 MiB flash. If you think that this device doesn't run any system software, think again. The phrase "no operating system" should rather be interpreted as "you have no option but to run the factory installed software"...

In my opinion, classic Linux based thin client terminals are the best compromise. This includes such as IGEL Universal Desktop, Fujitsu terminals with eLux, and HP.


Regards, ---
Peter Åstrand           ThinLinc Chief Developer
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