Re: [seul-edu] thin clients using Linux in the classroom?

[Les Richardson <richl@mail.tfsd.sk.ca>]

The latest PC's here, diskless with PXE Nic onboard and a 1GHz processor
was just over the $300CDN mark (no monitor). From testing last week they
are dynamite fast (as would be expected) assuming that you have the
network bandwidth to not bottleneck. (ie. switched 100, perhaps Gigabit to
the server (since it is now relatively inexpensive)). However an old
Compaq 486-66 with PCI bus and a fast Nic wasn't much slower....

Up here in Canada, we have the Computers for Schools program that gives
this kind of iron away to schools. Their bottom end is now slow
Pentium class machines which easily fulfill a thin client role by pulling
the hard drive, and putting in a network bootable nic.

Les Richardson
H. Hardcastle School
Edam, Sk. Canada


On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Dan Kegel wrote:

> Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> > On Thu, 31 Oct 2002, Dennis Daniels wrote:
> > 
> >>To outfit a room with 30 thin client stations cost about 12K$. That's
> >>not including the service fees for maintaining the server and access to
> >>the databases. Ostensibly, the costs would be much lower if the package
> >>did not include proprietary licensed apps.
> > 
> > That sounds like a fair price (at around $400 each) if this includes
> > decent hardware and monitor for each client (using Citrix).
> 
> Microtel can supply a diskless workstation with monitor for $250
> in quantities of 50.  (I specified 17" monitor, I think that's
> what the quote covered.)  $400 is sounding a little pricy!
> 
> - Dan
>