[Lias] netNOW NZ - Getting to the source

[Craig Ringer]

>>But if you use LTSP (plug plug: www.ltsp.org) thin clients,
>>the minimum
>>becomes a 486 with 16MB (P100 with 32MB even better). As long as the
>>server is beefy you can run all the GUIs you like.

P100 with 32mb of RAM is the practical minumum for acceptable everyday 
performance with modern apps like mozilla and OO.o . A 100mbps NIC helps 
a lot for occasional full-screen redrawing and display of huge images, 
but otherwise isn't needed.

The biggest problem with 486s though is the video cards - 800x600x8bit 
if your're lucky. 8bit colour with modern apps is really nasty - I think 
a reasonable minimum is 1024x768x16bit . OEM P100s are usually great in 
this regard, as something like 90% have an S3 Trio32 or Trio64 chip in 
them which matches the video requirements quite nicely.

> We ran a trial of LTSP about 4 months ago, very impressive, but did not
> proceed to widespread deployment because the OpenOffice Presentation app
> failed to run many of the presentations built in Powerpoint.  It seems to
> have the weakest compatability compared to Word and Excel.  We also had
> problems getting a browser set up to run all the plug-ins that were needed
> for many education sites, but could probably have fixed this with
> perseverence.  Biggest problem was Macromedia Flash would not work with
> LTSP.   We are hoping that these may be resolved soon.

The flash issue was fixed a fair while ago with the release of Flash 
Player 6 for Linux. It was a macromedia bug and they'd been stonewalling 
for 2 years... *sigh*.

I haven't had a problem yet, and I use a P100 diskless LTSP workstation 
as my primary machine now (the old dog food technique).

Also, to be honest I've found OO.o's PowerPoint compatability much 
better than its Word compatability (which I think is rather poor). OO.o 
has a /lot/ of problems handing Word documents with very complex 
formatting and layout. Working at a newspaper, I get a lot of those, as 
you'd be amazed by the number of people who think that Word is an 
acceptable desktop publishing program.

That said, our app set:
Red Hat 8.0 running DHCPd, tftpd, gdm2, etc
Mozilla 1.3 (xft RPM build)
OpenOffice 1.0.1 (built in to RH8)
IceWM 1.2.7 (customised theme and config)
Rox-Filer 1.3.8-1

works really nicely. I have a few reliability problems with mozilla that 
I'm trying to track down, but other than that it all runs great.