[Opensource] Thin client....very cheap computing!

[Brett Groves]

Hi Peter
For printing we simply allocated one spare printer to that area and hung 
it off one of the thin clients. The only minor issue is that client has 
to have been turned on and communicated with DHCP for it to work. As for 
wider network access we sort of made a virtue out of a necessity in that 
we actually didn't want them to have school wide network access, so they 
just have storage on their own server and no access to any shared or 
mapped drives.

The primary function of this network was to provide word processing and 
access to web 2.0 tools so really school wide network access was 
redundant. However if you install Samba (I think it comes in 
Ubuntu8.10...we used 8.04) you can certainly get Linux to see and access 
the network drives. Bearing in mind though there are some non 
interchangeable file formats!

Brett

Peter Ruwoldt wrote:
> Excellent
> How did you go with getting access to and mapping drives to a windows
> server?
> Was printing an issue?
> Peter
>
> 2009/2/22 Brett Groves <groves.brett.g at edumail.vic.gov.au>
>
>   
>> Hi all,
>>
>> We had a major problem last year with trying to supply ICT support to our
>> VCAL area last year as there was no budget available (sound  familiar?).
>> Stumbled across the fact that Ubuntu Linux comes with thin client support
>> built in. We gutted 20 old Acer 5100's, removed the hard drives etc and
>> grabbed a spare 100Mbs 3Com switch and connected them all up. For a server
>> we bought a very high end Acer PC for about $1300. We set it up over the
>> hols and it really does work impressively, exceeding all expectations. There
>> is virtually no indication to users that they are working on a dumb terminal
>> except there is no need to bother turning them off!
>>
>> So for about $1500 we kitted out a whole computer lab and we have no
>> worries about licences or paying for updates.....impressively cheap.
>>
>> If anyone on the list is looking for a solution like this to get computer
>> access for students using all open source and mostly old hardware then
>> please feel free to drop me a line for help or you are most welcome to pop
>> through the school to have a look at how it works in action.
>>
>> If you are worried about Linux as I was I managed to teach myself pretty
>> quickly how to configure the whole system using the resources on the
>> Edubuntu site and a bit of googling. I'm no uber-techie by a long way so it
>> gives you some indication how simple Ubuntu at least is to play with.
>>
>> Brett Groves
>> ICT Manager
>> Croydon Secondary College
>> 03 9725 8277
>> groves.brett.g at edumail.vic.gov.au
>>
>>
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