[plug] Linux thin clients

[Craig Ringer]

> We're going to be using them in our public library which means they need 
> a web browser and that's it, if anyone knows of any retailers I can 
> contact about getting one for a trial, please let me know !

I've recently deployed Linux thin clients. After some investigation, I 
was unable to find dedicated thin client hardware (Xterms or similar) at 
reasonable prices.

I eventually opted to use old PCs, and am getting good results. They're 
a bit limited, but very affordable. Based on my experience, I'd suggest 
a MINIMUM spec of P100, and strongly advise P166 or better.

If you have the option, a Via C3 EPIA-based machine can make an 
excellent thin client. I sometimes boot my Pentium-III 900MHz laptop off 
the network and use it as a thin client - it feels just like I'm sitting 
at the server. Which is quite impressive when the server is a dual Xeon. 
The P133s perform fine at 800x600, but I wouldn't reccomend them for use 
at resolutions of 1024x768 or above (alas), nor if you expect heavy use 
of animated pages using Flash, etc. They're OK, but not ideal for that 
sort of thing. We use them as pretty basic terminals (email, OpenOffice, 
etc) and they do a great job for that.

We're using LTSP (http://www.ltsp.org) for our thin clients' software, 
and it does the job well. The back end is a seriously overpowered 
server, with XFCE, Mozilla, etc for the software environment. I posted 
about this in detail a while ago, so if you're interested you can go 
trolling through the PLUG archives.

Craig Ringer