« previous next »
Pages:  [1]     Go Down

Author Topic: You know, thin clients really aren't very thin these days...  (Read 3095 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline bhtooefr

  • Thread Starter
  • Posts: 1624
  • Location: Newark, OH, USA
  • this switch can tick sound of music
    • bhtooefr.org
You know, thin clients really aren't very thin these days...
« on: Thu, 11 March 2010, 10:07:26 »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpoiFu3tiDw

I picked one up to play around with it.

$200 gets you a 1.2 GHz ARM, 512 MiB RAM, 513 MiB flash (1 MiB for the boot ROM,) an XGI Volari Z11 with 64 MiB of VRAM, a case, a power supply, a rubber dome keyboard, and a cheap USB wheel mouse.

Oh, and solder pads for a SATA port and SD card connector.

Should be fun to play with for both embedded Linux and alternative OSes that run on ARM.
Logged

Offline didjamatic

  • Posts: 1352
You know, thin clients really aren't very thin these days...
« Reply #1 on: Thu, 11 March 2010, 11:27:19 »
I'm working on a thin client project right now, WYSE terminals running virtual desktops.  We've been using VMware but I'm testing Xendesktop and it's really cool.  Welcome to the past, and the future.
Logged
IBM F :: IBM M :: Northgate :: Cherry G80 :: Realforce :: DAS 4

Offline ch_123

  • * Exalted Elder
  • Posts: 5860
You know, thin clients really aren't very thin these days...
« Reply #2 on: Thu, 11 March 2010, 14:23:39 »
Truly the way forward. The day of the big, overpowered yet underused desktop are hopefully coming to an end...

At least for 90% of the population, I'll still be needing as many cores and gigs of RAM as money can buy.
Logged

Offline itlnstln

  • Posts: 7048
You know, thin clients really aren't very thin these days...
« Reply #3 on: Thu, 11 March 2010, 14:42:28 »
Quote from: ch_123;163223
Truly the way forward. The day of the big, overpowered yet underused desktop are hopefully coming to an end...
 
At least for 90% of the population, I'll still be needing as many cores and gigs of RAM as money can buy.

This.  For home, all I need is something to manage my media.  At work, I want a Cray.
Logged

Offline kishy

  • Posts: 1576
  • Location: Windsor, ON Canada
  • Eye Bee M
    • http://kishy.ca/
You know, thin clients really aren't very thin these days...
« Reply #4 on: Thu, 11 March 2010, 14:44:03 »
I picked up a Wyse Winterm S30 (366MHz Geode, 128MB RAM, 64MB flash, all the necessities for IO) for...was it $10? I think.

Taking my time examining the flash module's contents. Wanting to throw an alternate OS on it.
Logged
Enthusiast of springs which buckle noisily: my keyboards
Want to learn about the Kishsaver?
kishy.ca

Offline ricercar

  • * Elevated Elder
  • Posts: 1697
  • Location: Silicon Valley
  • mostly abides
You know, thin clients really aren't very thin these days...
« Reply #5 on: Thu, 11 March 2010, 16:31:13 »
I'm not seeing the point of a new CPU and 512 megabytes of RAM without Flash support. You can save $150 or more with a used WinCE tablet with 32MB, an arm processor, is slightly sluggish, but boots instantly without any noisy fans. This is a serious question: what does this HP offer that isn't present in a 1997 vintage WinCE?
Logged
I trolled Geekhack and all I got was an eponymous SPOS.

Offline kode

  • Posts: 106
  • Location: Sweden
You know, thin clients really aren't very thin these days...
« Reply #6 on: Thu, 11 March 2010, 16:37:17 »
Oh, but ARM will have native flash support soonish. Not that I really care for flash, leaning towards software freedom and all. I might consider a thin client for home use, really, but I'd probably be likely to find myself a sun ray of some sort instead, and put money into a portable ARM (or MIPS) based computer.

As for thin clients in general, they'll probably be gaining ground again. Everything else is in the cloud nowadays, so why not move the desktop processing power there again?
Logged

Offline bhtooefr

  • Thread Starter
  • Posts: 1624
  • Location: Newark, OH, USA
  • this switch can tick sound of music
    • bhtooefr.org
You know, thin clients really aren't very thin these days...
« Reply #7 on: Thu, 11 March 2010, 16:38:22 »
It can run a modern web browser without using server resources, if you don't need Flash. This is huge for corporate intranet stuff.

And, keep in mind that the RISC OS community is looking into it - right now, their fastest machine is a 600 MHz XScale, their only machine that's currently in production is a 400 MHz ARM9 that has a beta-quality version of the OS with minor sound issues and not so minor hard drive corruption issues, and the (by far) most common machine is a 233 MHz StrongARM that was last updated in 1997 (I'm not counting the Kinetic CPU card, they're not common,) on a 1994 motherboard design.

Besides, Adobe's working on Flash 10.1 for ARM stuff.
Logged

Offline Hak Foo

  • Posts: 1270
  • Make America Clicky Again!
You know, thin clients really aren't very thin these days...
« Reply #8 on: Thu, 11 March 2010, 21:31:45 »
The big appeal I can see is resources on demand.

I was thinking about virtualizing our office.  We do web development.

We have mostly single-core Sempron, Celeron, and Athlon 64 boxes.  The "big boys" are a Core 2 E6400 (often broken) and an Athlon X2 4200+ which needs an OS reinstall.  Most machines are 1-2G of RAM; the biggest is 3.

If we had that 48-core Opteron setup, we could set up virtual environments with a few dedicated cores per desk, and some special purpose images for Win2000, Linux, etc. for testing--if nobody was in, one person could command all 48 cores himself.

And then the lame PCs would be little more than dumb X-terminals.

I loved X terminals; our university had a big lab:  100 Win2000 PCs, 100 OS 9 Macs, 10 X terminals.  I skipped the queue with my Unix skills and grabbed the terminal.  I recall filling up my quota (mounted as home directory) with the Netscape cache.
Logged
Overton130, Box Pale Blues.

Offline didjamatic

  • Posts: 1352
You know, thin clients really aren't very thin these days...
« Reply #9 on: Thu, 11 March 2010, 21:47:09 »
Want to upgrade every system in an enterprise from XP to Windows 7?  Build an image of Windows 7, test it, ask users to reboot, they PXE boot, a Win7 image streams to them, Done.

It's amazing stuff for the right application, but not for everything or everyone.
Logged
IBM F :: IBM M :: Northgate :: Cherry G80 :: Realforce :: DAS 4

Offline TexasFlood

  • Posts: 1084
You know, thin clients really aren't very thin these days...
« Reply #10 on: Thu, 11 March 2010, 22:07:45 »
Quote from: didjamatic;163350
Want to upgrade every system in an enterprise from XP to Windows 7?  Build an image of Windows 7, test it, ask users to reboot, they PXE boot, a Win7 image streams to them, Done.

It's amazing stuff for the right application, but not for everything or everyone.

I deployed some Sun Rays.

Virtualization is interesting now, Sun with Virtual Box, Citrix moving into VMWare space.  Me, hopefully soon getting off my ass and installing VMWare Workstation 7 on my PC, :smile:.
Logged

Offline bhtooefr

  • Thread Starter
  • Posts: 1624
  • Location: Newark, OH, USA
  • this switch can tick sound of music
    • bhtooefr.org
You know, thin clients really aren't very thin these days...
« Reply #11 on: Thu, 11 March 2010, 23:05:28 »
There's actually a difference between a pure thin client and what you're talking about.

What you're talking about is a diskless client. It has some local processing resources, and runs a normal OS, just booted over the network.

In the case of a pure thin client, you just upgrade the VM on the server, tell them to disconnect, and then reconnect.
Logged
Pages:  [1]     Go Up
« previous next »