multimedia (flash)

[dhicks]

if I understand correctly, there's an RDP 7 client available for Windows XP

Ah, just found it:

Description of the Remote Desktop Connection 7.0 client update for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) for Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows Vista SP2

Is there some trick whereby you can replace explorer.exe with whatever you want, so you could avoid having a local start menu and simply have a full-screen local RDP client?

This shouldn't be too tricky to set up - you'd be able to install any needed drivers locally, too, so there should be few hardware compatability problems. I'll see how the RDP client runs on a couple of old RM Tablet PCs I'm setting up, and I'll maybe try on one of the second-hand Tulip PCs we have - just checked eBay, similar half-height PCs with Windows XP Home licenses are available for £30 plus delivery.

Edit: Ah, just realised I can do a direct comparison between the Windows XP RDP client and rdesktop on identical hardware - I'll see if we have time next week.

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David Hicks

[Butuz]

is this a purely hardware solution and not software (apart from win 2k8 r2? )


Dan

Yes in my opinion. Even on my 2003 terminal servers the difference between weak thin clients such as HP T5135 and much more powerful thin clients such as Axel M80 is massive. E.g T1535 struggle with simple flash wheras M80's can play youtube vids.

I'd love to try on 2008!!!

Butuz

[VirtueTechnologies]

Ah, just found it:

Description of the Remote Desktop Connection 7.0 client update for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) for Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows Vista SP2

Is there some trick whereby you can replace explorer.exe with whatever you want, so you could avoid having a local start menu and simply have a full-screen local RDP client?

This shouldn't be too tricky to set up - you'd be able to install any needed drivers locally, too, so there should be few hardware compatability problems. I'll see how the RDP client runs on a couple of old RM Tablet PCs I'm setting up, and I'll maybe try on one of the second-hand Tulip PCs we have - just checked eBay, similar half-height PCs with Windows XP Home licenses are available for £30 plus delivery.

Edit: Ah, just realised I can do a direct comparison between the Windows XP RDP client and rdesktop on identical hardware - I'll see if we have time next week.

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David Hicks

Hi David,

10ZiG offer FREE Thin Desktop with their RBT616v thin clients, this great product will also help you to lock down PC's or laptops that you want to use in this way.

Here's a link to a short 3.5 min video that explains everything and also a 30 day evaluation download link:

http://www.10zig.com/thinclient/thindesktop.php

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks
Best Regards
Zak

[flyinghaggis]

Thinsation is designed for exactly that, although I prefer Slax. We currently have Slax configured with no Window manager, it just boots straight up in to a full-screen RDP client, you don't even know it's a Linux-based machine. The user doesn't need to select from a list of servers, you can get DHCP to do (crude) load-balancing.

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David Hicks

Having no *nix experience it's probably not something I'd be able to do without quite a bit of work but that sounds pretty good. Would certianly be interested in having a look at your customised (boot to RDP) version of Slax if you're happy/allowed to share it. I'm sure a few other folks on here would appreciate it aswell.

[dhicks]

Having no *nix experience it's probably not something I'd be able to do without quite a bit of work but that sounds pretty good.

No, that's the great thing about Slax - it's a cunningly customisable distribution, you can actually build and download the exact system you want from their web-based system. We found you just had to modify one startup script to load up rdesktop to connect to whatever TS server you want.

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David Hicks

[dhicks]

10ZiG offer FREE Thin Desktop with their RBT616v thin clients

Yes, but a whole RDP 7-capable machine is £30 off eBay, and we already have a cupboard full of free ones to get through first! Actually, I might try using the old RM Tablets we have as thin client workstations - I've just tried one with Skype and video performance was good enough, so I imagine an RDP client should be fine. Windows XP Tablet Edition (including all the drivers and so on) seems to be around 9GB, so it might prove a bit expensive to replace the harddrives with solid state drives - can you use 16GB CF cards as harddrives?

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David Hicks

[Butuz]

You can get compactflash to ide converter though compactflash drives are pretty slow compared to IDE/SATA.

Butuz

[dhicks]

though compactflash drives are pretty slow compared to IDE/SATA.

Is that just due to the speed of the cards themselves, though - I thought the CF interface pretty much needed just a pin-converter to let you plug it straight in to IDE?

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David Hicks

[dhicks]

I'll put in a request to the 10ZiG R and D teams to see if they have these figures for you.

We did a comparison between identical machines running Windows XP with RDP 7 client and Linux with rdesktop (RDP 5.2). We couldn't see any real difference - our simple load-a-YouTube-video-and-see-if-the-sound-stays-in-sync test ran about the same on both machines. This rather implies that any performance improvement is due to having Windows 2008 R2 on the server and half-decent CPU/graphics client side, so we might as well skip using any kind of specialised thin client device and just use whatever generic nettop we can get cheapest. If we need USB port redirection for IWB drivers we can simply use Windows XP client-side (or, actually, just install the drivers locally). It'd probably still be handy to have some benchmark figures, as I'm sure RDP 7 must do something useful.

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David Hicks

[dhicks]

we might as well skip using any kind of specialised thin client device and just use whatever generic nettop we can get cheapest

I'd just like to point out how pleased we are with the RM all-in-one machines we just got from this eBay seller:

eBay My World - top_topdeals

£100 gets you a machine, with built-in 17" 1280x1024 screen, that makes a perfectly capable thin client. They won't quite manage YouTube video playback (they aren't quite new enough to run fast enough to keep the video and audio in sync, although both audio and video quality are pretty good) but they seem to be able to handle everything else okay. The cases would seem to take standard motherboards (probably with a low-profile fan/heatsink and half-height PCI cards), so you could probably get a bunch of cheap processor/motherboard/RAM bundles for another £100 each if you wanted right up-to-date thin clients. Speaking to him yesterday, he has about 500-odd machines still, so there's plenty around.

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David Hicks