[ILUG] Thin Client in a secondary school

[John Hegarty]

We got a 3rd hand server a few days ago and am playing around with it as
a terminal server. By our standards it is a pretty beefy machine, a
compaq proliant 5500 with 4 PIII Xeon 500MHz chips and 3X18 GB scsi
drives. Downloaded and installed a distribution from
http://www.k12ltsp.org/ which is based around Fedora Core 1 and the
software developed by the Linux Terminal Server Project
http://www.ltsp.org/. 

I want to do two things.

      * Use some old computers as thin clients and distribute them to
        various parts of the school.
      * Buy a couple of really snazzy looking thin clients

I want to do the first because we have some old PCs and this will give
them a useful new lease of life. We already have this bit worked out
having a short run with 3 clients booting from a floppy - trying 15
tomorrow night.The techie students here are having good fun with this.
We are using newer PCs at the moment and will move on to the old ones
next week.Our first time playing with RAID arrays too. As rank amateurs
in the world of Linux it is a testimony to how far linux has come that
we can get this far with it.

I want to do the second for a number of reasons
      * I don't want Linux to be seen as a poor relation only to be put
        on old PCs with Windows going on "proper machines".
      * I want the students to know that there are other ways of having
        access to computers and software besides the PCs they are used
        to using.
      * I want the management here to see somthing that might be
        deployed where appropriate, offering a more cost effective and
        reliable solution for the most commonly used applications at
        second level - internet, email & wordprocessing.

I am looking for suggestions for thin clients and where they can be
sourced in Ireland.

I would also be interested in peoples experiences with thin client both
from a user point of view and an admin point of view. What are the
pitfalls and hurdles I need to look out for. At this stage we are quite
literally playing with this thing to see what we can get out of it.

As an aside, some of the first years are wondering why I have an ugly
noisy air conditioner sitting on my desk.

And finally,
I posted a tale of woe a few weeks ago regarding difficulties with
Eircom giving us DSL without a 3Gb quota. Some people gave me good
suggestions on how I might approach them. Having taken the advice
offered, the result is that Eircom are installing next Friday and the
3Gb quota won't be applied. To those who were annoyed by my non linux
related post - apologies.

jh