Thin Clients - where do I start

[LordNewton]

Ive been asked to look into thin client setup for a small primary school with very little money, but have no idea where to start, can someone give me a few pointers in the right direction please?

 

The School has a pritty good (not great) spec Win 2008 server and around 20 Windows XP PCs/Laptops

Edited February 22, 2012 by LordNewton
Corrected a spelling mistake

[nicholab]

The cutter project is a good place to start cutterproject

[pshuttle]

Thin client?

[LordNewton]

Thin client?

 

Thank you for your so helpful post

[pshuttle]

It wasn't meant to be sarky. I just didn't know if "think client" was a propriety thin client product?

[LordNewton]

Ive corrected the typo now - thank you for pointing it out

[glennda]

POssibly look at Zero Clients as well using MultiPoint server over Ethernet.

[jamesfed]

What kind of applications are they looking at running and what kind of problems are they looking to solve by using thin clients?

 

I am a great advocate of thin client techonlogy (we use them at my secondary) however I wouldn't look to use them in a primary without a very good reason.

[Axel]

Let me know if we can send you a terminal to connect to your existing server - will take about 20 seconds of your time to configure and connect, and give you

a pretty good feel of what thin clients are all about.

 

Axel Technical Support - M80 setup and booting - YouTube

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/thin-client-virtual-machines/22082-axel-ax3000-m70-lesson-monitor.html

 

[email protected]

[cpjitservices]

I've looked into this and did some testing I was using LTSP - Linux Terminal Services Project. It's built into Edubuntu, Its pretty simple and cost effective.

 

LTSP Live Howto | Edubuntu

 

Hope that link helps

[hit]

I'm having a HP 6200 with eight T200 clients delivered for testing and evaluation next week. I hope it's going to be as good as they claim as it will solve quite a few problems with finances being as they are! I'm not putting them into ICT suites though, no heavy graphics work, just for word processing/spreadsheets/research etc.

[dhicks]

Ive been asked to look into thin client setup for a small primary school with very little money, but have no idea where to start

 

In my experience, what makes a half-decent thin client is the client-side graphics performance - a Windows Server 2008 Remote Desktop Services server will provide pretty good performance to clients with reasonably modern graphics. Interestingly, the Raspberry Pi will include decent graphics - it could potentially make for a very good, cheap thin client:

 

Raspberry Pi | An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25. Take a byte!

 

Also, it should have good enough local performance to run a local web browser - simply have a basic Linux desktop with links to the local web browser and specific remote applications.

[LordNewton]

Hopefully only simple apps bit of word processing and internet, thinking a Linux client? Edited February 23, 2012 by LordNewton

[dhicks]

Hopefully only simple apps bit of word processing and internet, thinking a Lunix client?

 

Yes, any Linux distribution that includes RDesktop should be able to connect to a TS / RDS server okay. RDesktop only supports an older version of RDP, though, so you won't gain anything by having RemoteFX-enabled servers - there's no point paying for fancy server-accelerated graphics, Linux-based clients won't be able to use it. However, in my experience video performance is still perfectly acceptable in most cases anyway, and if you're using a local web browser to show most web pages and videos anyway, all the server is left doing most of the time is Word and the occasional PowerPoint slideshow.