On Wed, 19 May 2004, Trevor Johnston wrote:
> More important is to consider the administrative overhead of running
> locally installed Linux desktops. With the best of intentions and
> hardware it is a big job. Factor potentially dodgy machines and disks
> into the equation and it's never going to work.
>> A terminal setup seems the ideal solution for it both maximises the
> desktop experience and minimises the administrator's workload.
I absolutely second this. I'm sitting in front of a (silent!) 533MHz
mini-itx box, and OpenOffice starts in 2-3 seconds, as it does for each
of the other 17 terminals. The Real Machine (2 x 2.8GHz Xeon / 2GB /
U320 SCSI) is keeping cool in the basement.
I also second Conor's earlier point: you cannot have too much memory on a
terminal server. Our normal level is 1-1.3GB in use, and have
occasionally touched swap. SCSI is also a really good thing.
While the Arranmore project isn't going to be spending several K on a
big machine, they can get much better performance out of older machines as
terminals than using them standalone. It also allows you to (if money
ever does turn up to buy a better server and effectively upgrade all the
machines together, while continuing to scrounge for bits).
Ronan
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