Thin Clients (The Hardware)

[DLAS]

Hi,

I've recently spent some time putting together a Thinstation image that has a few basics on it (Firefox and a PDF reader) that also allows connection to a terminal server.

All we have at the minute are thick clients, which I'm fine with re-using as imitation "Thin Clients". I just wondered if anyone had any recommendations on which Thin Clients to buy moving forward that would suit my purposes. I was thinking something from Wyse or Dell, but to be completely honest I'm not sure what best suit my needs.

Anyone have any suggestions/experiences regarding the above?

Thanks,

[dhicks]

I just wondered if anyone had any recommendations on which Thin Clients to buy moving forward that would suit my purposes.

You could probably do worse than Acer Veriton / eMachines VESA-mountable PCs. Small, fully featured, and often around £150 - £200 on eBuyer or similar. I've found them to have decent graphics performance when running rdesktop under Linux (although probably not as good as a newer RDP client) and they are easily powerful enough to do local web browsing.

[CyberNerd]

For around £100 you could roll your own; Mini ITX board and dual core atom processor = £50, 2GB RAM and a case £50.
It'll be way more powerful than a purpose built thin client at nearly half the price.

[DLAS]

Thanks for the suggestions,

I quite like the idea of building my own! I came across a blog entry not so long ago where someone had used the Laser cutter in the technology department to custom create their own Thinclient containment using some left over acyrlic. With a smattering of LED's they really looked the part.

I'm just aware that alot of Thin clients ship with some embedded Linux/Windows "light" OS installed - just seems I can get exactly what I want (Plus alot more customisation) by using TS.

[jamesfed]

What kind of service are you going to be hooking your thin clients up to?

By that I mean are you running XenDesktop/Microsoft RDS/ect.
Next you need to work out what kind of user experience your thin clients will deliver - if they need to do multimedia and you are using XenDesktop then you want Windows based thin clients as they can take advantage of all the HDX technology (although flash is coming to Linux now).
If you only need the basics then Linux based devices will work out fine (and much cheaper).

Personally we use thin clients from 10zig - very nice small devices that hook into our Kaviza/VDI in a box system very nicely.

[CyberNerd]

Next you need to work out what kind of user experience your thin clients will deliver - if they need to do multimedia and you are using XenDesktop then you want Windows based thin clients as they can take advantage of all the HDX technology (although flash is coming to Linux now).
If you only need the basics then Linux based devices will work out fine (and much cheaper).

AFAIK the Citrix HDX Mediastream does work on the Linux receiver, since around version 11.1
Readme for Citrix Receiver for Linux, Version 11.100 - Citrix eDocs

I'm just aware that alot of Thin clients ship with some embedded Linux/Windows "light" OS installed - just seems I can get exactly what I want (Plus alot more customisation) by using TS.

You can get a lot of customisation with thinstation too.

[jamesfed]

[QUOTE=CyberNerd;757176]AFAIK the Citrix HDX Mediastream does work on the Linux receiver, since around version 11.1
Readme for Citrix Receiver for Linux, Version 11.100 - Citrix eDocs

Was waiting for someone to throw that bit in waiting for the update from 10zig for it but from what I understand its just as good as what Windows media redirection will do.

All the same however - many of the fancy (expecily high latency) features arn't in the Linux client.

[DLAS]

AFAIK the Citrix HDX Mediastream does work on the Linux receiver, since around version 11.1

You can get a lot of customisation with thinstation too.

I think that's what I said, maybe I worded it badly! I'm more than happy to use TS and am enjoying the level of customisation I can achieve with a piece of kit that is very powerful and very free. In fact I want to stay away from the Windows/Linux embedded stuff - which is why I quite like the possibility of building my own.

These Thinclients will be connecting to an already configured terminal server (RDS) that we've had for a while that has a few apps installed. Nothing too graphical or intensive. Our remote sessions have always struggled with intense graphical work or multimedia, so I tend to keep those sorts of things limited to the local machines (At least for now).

I just really like the idea of removing a number of "thick Clients" that we currently have to run, license, maintain, AV etc... with something that is cheaper to buy, cheaper to run and easier to maintain.

I've built a TS image that does exactly what I need and deployed it over the network (Have tested on some thick clients), now I just need some stripped down and cheaper hardware to run on.

I was just a bit baffled by the huge array of Thinclients available and wanted a bit of advice.

Thanks,

[Jamoire]

We have a combination of Intel D945GCLF2 board based self-builds running Thinstation and Axel M80F's.

Very happy with both to be honest. The Axel's are brilliant little unit's; very easy to setup and dont really need any maintanance. The self builds were great, worked out at around £105 a unit I think but we moved away from them with the last couple of rooms for the Axels purly due to the extra time needed to initially build them (which to be fair wasnt long at all, just more than the time we had spare).

[Axel]

Hi DLAS

We'd be delighted to loan you an Axel thin client to benchmark "anything" else against....

The M80 is a small device the size of a cigarette box that comes with bracket to mount on rear of monitor. It runs RDP natively from hardware, so minimal setup (no embedded Linux or Windows!)

As the M80 doesn't have an operating system it delivers higher performance than OS based devices but with less hardware, and less hardware equates to higher reliability (5 year warranty), lower power consumption (5w), faster booting (5 seconds), and lower cost !

There are in fact far fewer thin client manufacturers than you would believe, most "manufacturers" in fact buy in cheap Chinese product, and simply stick their logo on the box. So you see the same spec boxes turning up in different places.
Axel are a genuine manufacturer, designing and manufacturing products in Europe.


Here's what other Edugeek'ers think of the M80 - Let me know if we can send you one to play with

Axel AX3000 m70 for Lesson Monitor

You can see the Multipoint version of the M80 in a video clip on a post just below - this is very similar to the generic M80, but with all the defaults set for RDP/Multipoint...


Matthew@axel.com