Somewhere, buried in a box on the back porch, I have a ~ten port serial expansion module intended for just this sort of arrangement. It had terminals running off of a PC. Obviously, no sound or USB, we're talking pre-Windows hardware here.

Try LTSP and their are many liveCDs, howtos and clients to make it work fairly painlessly.

On 12/13/06, Jon Pruente <> wrote:

I think the main "leap of technology" here is the use of multiple video cards and keyboards with a single computer. That is a large step above simple serial terminals or remote sessions. While the idea certainly isn't new, the methodology and the features are much more advanced. For most office work a 500MHz machine is fine. Once the general overhead of the OS is accounted for each user only takes up a fraction of the CPU power for their application and the I/O involved. By using independent video cards they can take more load off the CPU by not needing to compress and send display info for a remote session, which would also clog the network with multiple users having simultaneous access.

I like their idea, but I think it's something that could be added in to Linux fairly easily with PCI video cards and USB devices. Once you work out a frame work of assigning particular groups of I/O to each other, start an X session for that group and off they go...

Jon.

http://www.ndiyo.org/

They are building custom hardware for thin client terminals. They've got a prototype of an Ethernet based client, and are working on a USB model. And it all runs on FOSS. They're running a custom Ubuntu install to handle the client setups. The USB model, called Hubster is a great concept. It's better and more focused than what I mentioned previously. Run it all over USB and use a hub as the method of delineating what parts go together for each terminal. Also, because it's based on a hub centric model, each station can have an independent config based on need. There will be no waste of features for some, and no lack of features for others. The Hubster model sounds like a great way to go about it. Adding in more USB 2.0 cards will give more users per machine than slapping in more video cards. You simply aren't going to get 10 users per machine and give them their own video card with 3-4 PCI slots.

And, the Ndiyo! people seem to want people to tae their idea and play with it for non-commercial applications. Great!

Jon.

On 12/14/06, Luke -Jr luke@dashjr.org wrote:

On Thursday 14 December 2006 09:47, Brian Kelsay wrote:

...

Try LTSP and their are many liveCDs, howtos and clients to make it work fairly painlessly.

As long as you have the video cards, it should be pretty painless anyway. _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug