Igel?

[meastaugh1]

Has anyone experience with Igel thin clients? Can you suggest how they compare with HP thin clients for example?

 

I'm having them in some time soon to demo, but wanted to know what other schools experiences were. Thanks.

[Geoff]

I saw an article in Linux Journal about them a few months ago. The article is now online.

 

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9108

[bazuk]

We are currently demo 2 of their units, the first is a tablet pc for the electronic registration, trouble is the demo unit overheats so we have sent it back, shame, its was pricey thought.

 

The second unit is happilly running our micro linux booting system for citrix connections, i want to see how hot it gets over the holidays so i can compare it to the hp units we already have.

 

Another supplier called vxl we have already tried.

 

baz

[Geoff]

The second unit is happilly running our micro linux booting system for citrix connections, i want to see how hot it gets over the holidays so i can compare it to the hp units we already have.

 

Is heat really a problem? I thought thin clients were supposed to run cooler because they drew less power and ran at lower clock speeds?

[Norphy]

We used them at my previous place. They do the job reasonably well and the management console is pretty good.

 

They could be better but then they could be a lot worse.

[meastaugh1]

We used them at my previous place. ... They could be better but then they could be a lot worse.

 

Have you used thin clients from any other manufacturer? If so, how do they compare? Thanks

[Norphy]

We had a couple of HP ones as well. In terms of performance, they were identical but being as the hardware spec was the same that wasn't surprising.

 

I'd say the HPs were slightly better built but there wasn't much in it.

 

I much preferred the IGEL management console over the Altiris solution that HP provided. Altiris was much too complicated imo, the IGEL one was a lot more straightforward to set up and configure clients with.

 

I also found that IGEL had significantly better support than HP did as well. I had a problem with the HP ones where I couldn't get USB drives to mount properly (see here). HP's response was "Oh, it's a bug with Linux, go work it out for yourself" which wasn't good. When I needed help from IGEL (Some students managed to wipe the CF cards containing the OS) they were excellent. They gave me a FTP address with the image for the OS, detailed instructions on how to reimage the clients and further help when I needed it. I always got a response within a couple of hours too.

[bazuk]

Hi all

Well here is an update have installed 41 igel 2110lx thin machines with 19"tft monitors on each took me 2 days to install them all and set them up to run on our pxe booted network for citrix connection.

 

Totally cool now i dont have to worry about them for oohh at least 5 years

 

baz