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+-- Forum: Special Interest (/forumdisplay.php?fid=53)
+--- Forum: Computers / technology (/forumdisplay.php?fid=14)
+--- Thread: Thin clients (/showthread.php?tid=1667)
Thin clients - badspyro - 07-15-2005 06:04 PM
i sorta descovered thease on the net....
they look cool, and will run off a network, and some even get there os off the server (not sure how yet)...
so, here they are... thin clients, search for them on ebay, I found some ofr only 10 pounds (that key isn't working atm lol)...
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=1479&item=5787469899&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW
i like the look of them and may get one yet, esp at that price...
wouldn't mind if anybody could shead some light on thease things though, as i have no idea on what is required to use them, and if the legendary windows CE is installed already....
thanks...
Badspyro
- boloop - 07-16-2005 05:16 PM
First of all why would you want one? Unless you are going to use them you'll have to need a proper set up network.
And they don't seem all that powerful to me.
Since these do not have a hard drive it needs acces to a network onto a server. Where the server is the hard drive and will be constantly excahnging data. And the thin client just displays Whatever it needs to display adn storing everything in its ram.
- Gareth - 07-16-2005 09:43 PM
You might want to check out the linux terminal server project - it's great for setting up openmosix clusters etc.
Personally, i would use an old 386/486 with the harddisk removed (though it's good to have some local swap space if you're going to run applications locally). The best use for a diskless thin client is as a terminal - POS systems in shops for example. VNC or X11 (do not mention RDP or i will woodle thee!) terminals can do graphics but take up more bandwidth and server resources.
Any machine can boot across a network in theory, you just need the BIOS support and a boot ROM on your ethernet card. You may be lucky to have the boot ROM built into your motherboard. If you don't then use this: http://rom-o-matic.net/ and get a floppy image. When the boot ROM is loaded (either from a chip or from a floppy) it sends out DHCP requests waiting for the server to give it an IP and tell it where to load the OS from. The OS is loaded into memory via TFTP and then mounts it's root filesysytem using NFS or a similar network filesystem. TLSP does this extremely well if you have a suitable machine to run as server - check it out: http://www.tlsp.org