Kyle Posted March 17, 2007 Posted March 17, 2007 I have beenreading about this today, does anybody use this for there thinclient set up?
localzuk Posted March 17, 2007 Posted March 17, 2007 I am currently trying it out. It works a charm. Speed is good. I'm gonna try out a group of kids on a test setup and see what they think next week. It is very easy to set up, integrates with existing Active Directory settings and allows for easy control of which terminal server to connect to depending on which group they are in. I would suggest you download it and give it a whirl on a spare machine, use PXE to boot the clients and you can have a working setup in 20 minutes.
tosca925 Posted March 17, 2007 Posted March 17, 2007 use PXE to boot the clients and you can have a working setup in 20 minutes. Do you have to sort out issues with specific NIC's to enable PXE boots
localzuk Posted March 17, 2007 Posted March 17, 2007 Probably yes, but almost all modern workstation PC's work fine with PXE (every machine in our school is PXE enabled). If you can't get it to work easily with PXE, you can use a CD boot version instead for testing purposes. What sort of machines do you have in the school?
Norphy Posted March 17, 2007 Posted March 17, 2007 I've been using it for converted PCs. It's a lot simpler than Thinstation is and it works well. We have found it fairly unstable on dedicated thin client hardware although bizarrely enough it works fine on converted PCs. NIC support with 2X seems good enough, the only one I have difficulty with is a Realtek gigabit one. All the others I've tried (3COM, Broadcom, Intel, VIA Rhine, Realtek 10/100) work fine. The 2X OS can be installed on local media if you want as well.
Norphy Posted March 17, 2007 Posted March 17, 2007 Free if you just use Terminal Services. If you want more advanced functionality and/or want to use Citrix, it starts from about £14 per client. Pricing direct from 2X here and from a UK reseller here
localzuk Posted March 17, 2007 Posted March 17, 2007 I wonder, with the binary version being available, is the source code available? It is GPL afterall...
CyberNerd Posted March 17, 2007 Posted March 17, 2007 use PXE to boot the clients and you can have a working setup in 20 minutes. Do you have to sort out issues with specific NIC's to enable PXE boots You can use old hardisks instead of buying PXE NIC's. Create an image using rom-o-matic for the network cards you have and install onto the disk. when the machines boot from disk they only load an etherboot loader (a few Kb) then proceed to boot from from the network. http://rom-o-matic.net/
Norphy Posted March 17, 2007 Posted March 17, 2007 I wonder, with the binary version being available, is the source code available? It is GPL afterall... The individual components of it like the Apache web server, the MySQL, the PXE boot loader, the kernel and the RDesktop client are GPL, yes. However the management console and the custom code for the OS isn't. There is a post with more information about what is and isn't licensed under the GPL on their forums here
tosca925 Posted March 18, 2007 Posted March 18, 2007 You can use old hardisks instead of buying PXE NIC's. Create an image using rom-o-matic for the network cards you have and install onto the disk. when the machines boot from disk they only load an etherboot loader (a few Kb) then proceed to boot from from the network. Do you know of an idiots guide to doing this?
CyberNerd Posted March 18, 2007 Posted March 18, 2007 You should just be able to download the rom-o-matic floppy disk image and 'dd' it to the hard-drive rather than the floppy. dd=/path/to/rom.image of=/dev/hda (using a linux live cd). Probably best to test the image with a floppy first. The configuration for rom-o-matic is quite well documented - rom-o-matic is the 'simple' version of http://www.etherboot.org
Ric_ Posted March 18, 2007 Posted March 18, 2007 @tosca925: Try http://etherboot.anadex.de/ - I use this and it's dead easy... it also supports most common NICs.
tosca925 Posted March 19, 2007 Posted March 19, 2007 @Ric. Thanks for that pointer. I have now got my PC booting from HDD but still having problems. It stops at looking for DHCP. I have checked my DHCP scope options and the server is set in there. I did try out Thinstation so the boot file name is stillpointing to that, does this need to change? DO i need to change other settings to get it to boot?
localzuk Posted March 19, 2007 Posted March 19, 2007 Have you authorised the server in your DHCP console?
bazuk Posted April 23, 2007 Posted April 23, 2007 Hi #All I considered using 2x thinclients but found out i would need to pay them some money as we use citrix for most things it came to about 140 X £14. So we had to stick with our thin client system which is basically a micro version of the linux kernel with the citrix client embedded and executed from the init rd image. Works like grease lightening, intersting fact is our version is what the 2x system used to be before 2x got hold of it, the original writer was Diego Torres Milano from argentina his code is the core of the 2x system thinclient os. Since is code was released under the gpl thats why the thinterminal part is still free. i dont like paying for anything if i can get it for free. baz
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