[ubuntu-za] Thin Client on Ubuntu 8.04

[Barry Wyatt]

Thanks, Jonathan

That helps a lot and goes a long way to pointing me in the right
direction.

After your previous email I tried a direct install on the PC I mentioned
using the earliest version Ubuntu I have - 5.10 - and I could not get it
to complete the install process - even when trying different install
options. So hardware seems to be the big problem. Mainly broke at the
configuring xserver-xorg step.

Edubuntu with LTSP - yes, but what version please? The changes they have
made in the 8.04 release don't seem to be widely documented. - Hilton
answered this one for me.

I am based in East London.  At present, if I can get the solution
working on three machines (and test run some educational lab software)
then I will be confident to make proposals for a 2009 community center
consideration - cause "he who gets the vision gets the job."

Thanks for your help on this,
Barry



On Fri, 2008-09-19 at 09:08 +0200, Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) wrote:
> Hi Barry
> 
> Barry Wyatt wrote:
> > The big question - what version of Ubuntu were you running in your thin
> > client application?
> 
> Edubuntu with LTSP. At the very minimum we used Pentium II machines. 
> Later on Pentium III's and 4's.
> 
> > I am a total beginner at Linux/Ubuntu and am beginning to think the Thin
> > Client project was a little ambitious to start with.
> 
>  From what it sounds like, you did everything right, your clients even 
> booted, it's probably just a matter of some old hardware.
> 
> > One of my machines is a 6x86L-PR200+  150 MHz  65536K memory   
> > Bios 1984-96
> > (Way older than five years :-)
> 
> Yes, the RAM is enough. The CPU should do ok too. The problem is 
> probably with the board itself. Many distributions have in recent years 
> dropped support for things like the ISA bus, which most P1 boards still 
> used. If it's using an integrated ISA sound card- or perhaps even a 
> critical device for the system, then it wouldn't work.
> 
> > Seeing that the machines are older than five years is there another
> > solution to get these to run a reasonable version of Edubuntu?  This is
> > the kind of machine that is "freely" available.  If I could buy multiple
> > units of modern hardware I would not have to go thin client.
> 
> Where are you based? How many machines do you need? Often, you can get 
> plenty of old machines that would work fine as thin clients just for the 
> price it takes to physically collect them. It might be a better choice 
> getting slightly newer machines from a support perspective as well. 
> Machines that are past their end of life often cause more problems than 
> they're worth. You'll find that with an old P1 system like that, you'll 
> also run into problems where some of them will have display cards with 
> too little memory to display proper resolutions, and there was a time in 
> the late 90's where there were many, many different weird display chips 
> around that will work with nothing anymore.
> 
> Hope that helps.
> 
> -Jonathan
> 
>