Thin-client enviroment

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005, Christopher Rasch-Olsen Raa wrote:

> This is what I want to have:
> 	A server running x.org
> 	All the clients logging onto the server to get a graphical UI
>
> I have absolutely NO idea how the xorg-server and such works, and that
> is why I turn to this list for help. My goal is to get the whole network
> uniform (eg. all the different computers running the exact same
> programs, and beeing configured the exact same way, etc), to ease the
> hell of management I am experiencing now.. I plan on having the clients
> run Fedora Core 3, and were thinking about Debian on the server.

I have done this a few times with NetBSD and Linux with good success. The
normal way to do this is to have a server that provides DHCP and BOOTP
service, TFTP service and NFS service. You could choose to use one shared
installation of the operating system or multiple installations of the
operating system on the server (which the clients use).

Then the clients using network booting to grab a bootable image from the
server. This custom kernel uses NFS to mount a directory (or more) on the
main server containing all the software and data and configs needed by the
clients. The clients then start up a X server.

The X server runs on the box that has the keyboard, mouse and display
monitor.

Depending on your needs, you may choose to have the other software (the X
clients) running directly on the main server (this is the normal way) or
running on the workstation itself (which is what I prefer).

I used LTSP a few times and I found it to be poorly documented and
insufficient for my needs. (I had to do many customizations and used
http://www.Pkgsrc.org/ to provide the software used by the thin clients.)

Some other ideas to look at include:

PXES Universal Linux Thin Client
http://pxes.sourceforge.net/

Diskless Remote Boot in Linux
http://drbl.sourceforge.net/

http://www.k12ltsp.org/

Netstation Linux
http://netstation.sourceforge.net/

Diskless Embedded Technology Personal Computer
http://diet-pc.sourceforge.net/

ThinBSD
http://www.thinbsd.org/

ThinStation
http://thinstation.sourceforge.net/

ThinTUX - Thin Client Linux based OS
http://thintux.sourceforge.net/

Setting up a thinclient solution from scratch can take a lot of work. Here
are some examples:
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2004/09/30/diskless_clients.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-diskless.html
http://www.the-labs.com/FreeBSD/Diskless/

As you can see most of the work with a thin client solution is not related
to X specifically.

Good luck,

 Jeremy C. Reed

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