[K12OSN] A few ~$200 thin clients to try

[Rob Owens]

On Sat, Apr 05, 2008 at 01:43:35PM -0700, Bill Moseley wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 05, 2008 at 02:04:07PM -0400, Rob Owens wrote:
> > It does not give adequate performance under LTSP 5,
> > so you might want to consider how soon you might be upgrading to an
> > LTSP 5 system.  It would be a shame to upgrade and then have to get
> > rid of all your thin clients.
> 
> What changes that significantly in that move to LTSP5?  The X over
> SSL?  That can be disabled.  Otherwise, what causes the extra load on
> the thin clients when moving to LTSP 5?

I don't know enough about LTSP 5 to say what makes these clients slower, but you can see this page for verification from an expert that it is true:  http://www.disklessworkstations.com/cgi-bin/web/200110.html?id=bY33IUFr

I tested it myself on Ubuntu 7.10 with LTSP 5 and found the boot times to be about 2.5 minutes if I remember correctly.  I don't have my notes in front of me, but I remember performance being terrible with X over ssh.  When I disabled that using DIRECTX=True, it got better but it was still pretty slow for basic things like screen refreshes when minimizing/maximizing/moving a window, or scrolling a spreadsheet.  

Of course, my requirements might be different than yours.  I'd recommend trying one out.  They're cheap enough.  Just don't buy a ton of them until you've tried it on LTSP 5.

Who knows, future versions of LTSP 5 might be less demanding on the thin clients and these could turn out to be pretty good.  But so far my experience tells me not to use them for LTSP 5.

-Rob