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"Thin Clients" that Support Linux and Windows? 59

Posted by Cliff from the wouldn't-this-be-nice dept.
An Anonymous Coward asks: "I have been searching for a thin client that accesses both Linux and Microsoft systems and am dismayed to find that most thin clients only support MS RDP or Citrix ICA. Yes, I know that any old PC can be made into a 'thin client' and that X-stations have existed for many years for Unix based systems, but I will be buying new hardware for a new office that needs mainly MS connectivity. Since I am also including a Linux server or two on the network and think that Linux has a chance on the desktop, I would like to purchase thin-clients that can connect to both instead of being locked in by design from the start. This way, I can eventually move users onto Linux desktops in the future without replacing anything on the desktop." How hard would it really be to add on X11 functionality to an existing Windows thin client? While the realities of the current market makes finding such products unlikely, maybe if we can drum up the interest now there may be hope to see something like this in the future.

"I have a chance to buy top of the line hardware for this project and am looking for something that has a small footprint, no moving parts, ICA client or MS RDP, Linux connectivity (embedded X server?), a real manufacturer and a nice design that would not look out of place in a brand new, designer furnished office.

The Compaq Evo T20 serves my current needs perfectly, except that it forever locks me into Windows on the desktop, Does anybody have alternatives they can suggest?"
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"Thin Clients" that Support Linux and Windows? More

"Thin Clients" that Support Linux and Windows?

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  • exceed (Score:2, Informative)

    by bluelip ( 123578 )
    To have a windows client appear as an X11, check out Hummingbird's Exceed. Rutgers U had labs full of Windows desktops with Exceed running on them. Worked quite well.

  • IBM Netstation (Score:5, Informative)

    by Howie ( 4244 ) <howieNO@SPAMthingy.com> on Thursday January 10, 2002 @08:23AM (#2815650) Homepage Journal
    I've been keeping an eye out for one of these at a decent price...

    The IBM Network Station 1000 Model 8362 is a PowerPC-603-based thin client with support for VT emulation, X, ICA/Citrix, local Java apps, 1600x1280x8bit graphics, sound.

    The complicated part is that they were designed to be slaved off of a Win2k/NT or AIX box, but people have figured out ways around that [linuxdoc.org] for the most part.

    Best of all, they're silent, too.

    They seem to go on E-Bay for around 300Eur (These guys [abgcomputers.nl] have them for 450Eur with a 1yr warranty. [for those not in Europe, that's $270 and $400 US, respectively]
    • Very nice. It's an actual thin client workstation, not a graphics terminal. And the specs are impressive.

      But is this the practical choice? For about the same amount of money, you can buy a Celeron-based system and install the requisite software. And you end up with hardware people know how to fix if it breaks. Unless your server is NT or AIX, you'll have to do some hacking either way, so Cost of Ownership isn't an issue. The IBM does have nice graphics and no noise -- but does that outweigh the other factors?

      Please convince me that I'm wrong. I rather want to be.

      • Since the poster is running a Windows Terminal Server or Citrix-based network, the hacking is not an issue for them, only me. I suspect if you buy a bunch of these from IBM, they might support them (or at least the newer models in the same line - the NetVista).

        For $300 I doubt you could buy a Celeron as reliable as something with no moving parts, nor as compact, as quiet and with a 15 minute setup time - all factors for MIS support. I think for corporate use, it does outweigh the other factors. Heck, I want one for myself, just because of the size/noise factor.
      • It is practical when you think in terms of the cost of ownership. PC's cost a bunch of money to support. Sure, the one that you have is reliable and seems to work well, but you're a technically capable maintainer.

        The appeal of this sort of device is that it has no moving parts to break, and it's vey difficult to corrupt the system. When one fails, the user can be back up an running by pulling the spare unit out of the closet and plugging it in.

        The reliability of a green-screen, with the features of a GUI terminal. Very cool...and it runs Linux, and works perfectly with Citrix boxes. We've recently evaluated these units and plan to add them to out environment.
        • Your point about no moving parts is a good one. Your other points are the standard NC arguments. Personally, I agree with them, though the IT establishment has never accepted them. And they're mitigated by the need to hack the system to make it work with servers IBM doesn't support.

  • Netvista... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vreeker ( 264162 ) <slashdot@opid.ca> on Thursday January 10, 2002 @08:25AM (#2815653) Homepage
    I am in the planning stage of an internet cafe with similar needs. The thin clients that have caught my eye are the IBM NetVista N2200e or NetVista N2800e. Spec Sheets [ibm.com] say it will do everything you've asked...

    Price is probably a bit of a kicker unless you order 50+... good old IBM.

    --
    $Canada = $US;
    $Canada =~ s/house/igloo/g;
    • The way I read the spec sheets on those units is that, while by default running an ICA client, they can be configured to run a stripped-down linux system.

    • Re:Netvista... (Score:3, Informative)

      by msouth ( 10321 )
      I'm not sure what your needs on the windows side are, but the company I work for (www.netraverse.com) has a product called Win4Lin that will allow you to run most office-related Windows applications at near-native speeds on Linux, and there has been some effort put into making it work on a NetVista. If you would like more information you can email me at msouth@netraverse.com and I can put you in touch with the guy that did the work.

      The product works really well, and you can run it in full-screen mode so that it looks just like you are sitting at a windows box.
      • Does Win4Lin still have the annoying 64MB of RAM limit? Win4Lin works great for IE and Lotus Notes but chokes when opening Visio or other demanding apps.
        • Does Win4Lin still have the annoying 64MB of RAM limit?

          Yep. :). But I am pretty sure I heard that it will be gone in 4.0. It's not just the 64k, but something about how swap is handled, too. Both are addressed in the 4.0 release if I understand correctly.

  • If by affordable, you mean priced inline with Windows-only Citrix-based terminals, like the Wyse WinTerms which start around $300, the options are slim. The best thing I came up with during my search would've been to take a New Internet Computer [thinknic.com] ($199) and hack up the boot CD with some custom software.

    The downside to the NIC, of course is twofold. First, it will involve custom, non vendor-supported work on your part; secondly the NIC relies on a CD drive for the OS.

    I looked, briefly, into assembling small, custom units, using 16 or 32MB IDE flash cards, and found that to compete with off the shelf units on price, you'd have to move to a much larger size and the appearance of a hacked up unit. To compete with them on size, and you'd have to go to single board computers with custom casings, and lose any sense of price parity.

    I could suggest the possibility of getting Xterms, and then running a Citrix client from the Linux system, but that's too ugly. Not to mention that Xterms are quite a bit pricier than the winterms.

    Looking at the winterms, adding xterm functionality to a box that alread has RDP, ICA, telnet and internet explorer would be a relatively simple task and, even if offered as an upgraded model, would probably help the marketing effort, I get the feeling that their licencing agreement for Windows RDP (or the WinCE the unit's based on) probably prohibits them from integrating it with a X11 based client.

    Of course a winterm could connect to a unix server, if you want to run Solaris or AIX instead of Linux, you're free to get a citrix server for those systems at the same low-low price of the Windows servers. It's either that or hope somebody can reverse-engineer RDP and get a server working on Linux.
    • There is already a Linux RDP client [rdesktop.org]. Maybe this could be used as a starting block to make a X11->RDP gateway.

      It would be a very good project indeed. While X11 is a much better protocol in my opinion, having RDP for Linux isn't a bad thing.
      • rdesktop is a superb piece of software, but it's backwards for solving his problem. He wants to start with an entirely Windows based thin network and then slowly move it to Linux, not the other way round.
        • Actually what I proposed was taking an X11 desktop and convert it to RDP. Much like VNC does. That way you see X11, but it is delivered via RDP and so it can be used with RDP thin clients.

          ICA would probably be a better protocol to use though since ICA is better supported across many platforms and I haven't seen a thin client that does RDP and not ICA. ICA is also a better protocol to begin with. The upside of RDP is that it would be fun to deliver the Linux desktop via a "Microsoft Technology".

          I suppose my origional post was a little unclear.
          • and I haven't seen a thin client that does RDP and not ICA.

            You mean apart from rdesktop, the one you mentioned? ;-)

            I like the idea though, having been playing with VNC a lot in the last few weeks. Are there actually specs for ICA though?

      • Of course if his company is the type where things have to be bought or needs 24 bit color, sound, and local printing for the apps, he can always get WinConnect [thincomputinginc.com]. (hopefully rdesktop supports that too, but I couldn't determine that from the website).

    • Why would he need to customize it? It already comes with a Citrix ICA client, VNC, ssh, xterm, telnet, and runs X. If he needs an RDP client, that can probably be added. They do have the CD iso's available on their website. They also have a list of all the packages that they use and any of their patches on the site too.

      The only requirement that it doesn't meet is 'no moving parts'. Upgrading would be as simple as dropping in a freshly burned CD, which is better than most desktops now, but not as good if could be performed over the network.

    • According to this HowTo [ltsp.org], you can have the ThinkNIC boot directly from the net without making or using a CDROM.

  • There is a Linux ICA client, which would allow you to deploy X terminals and present ICA clients to them from a Linux concentrator which would make the ICA connections to your WinNT/2K box. The disadvantage of this is the need to deploy both X and ICA to every client when you only need one or the other in practice normally. On the other hand, if you actually have the option of presenting Linux as an alternative, you can run your Windows apps in Application Publication mode and simply present them inside a Gnome or KDE environment on your X terms.
  • That makes a big difference. HP NetVectra's and a bunch of Wyse WinTerm's support RDP, ICA, and telnet (and ssh). I think HP's higher end models may even do X sessions. It's not hard to find them at all....
    Then again, you could just get Citrix for Unix, and not worry about a thing (which maybe be in your best interests in a larger environment...)
  • eXceed does some neat things with automagically sending X apps to windows clients. It isn't cheap, but it is a nice X Server.
    • Just curious if there exists any instuctions on how to get exceed setup to connect to the Linux X server, I do it all the time here to connect to solaris boxes, but the same connect strings adjusted to to connect to the linux xterm don't seem to work.
  • I can't quite tell from the question, but: could VNC help here? Since there's a VNC viewer and server for almost every platform, you can be wonderfully agnostic about what you deploy.
    • Might want to check out ThinVNC as well. I currently use Citrix Winframe/Metaframe at this office. We support about 150 users, most of them are located at remote offices using dial-up connections. The bandwith needed for ICA clients is about 20kbps. A 56k connection is more than enough, provided you don't have too many hops between your servers and the dial-up ISP.

      We primarily run a DOS app over this connection. I am considering trying out a ThinVNC solution... I am thinking that we could run the DOS app in a DOS emulation (DOSEMU, Wine, etc) on a Linux server. The sites would connect via ThinVNC then run the DOS app. I have concerns about the printing rammifications and drive mappings across VNC to the clients (we constantly need to print from this app, and occassionally need to copy files to their local PC which is a Win9x/2000 machine). I haven't looked into it enough, though.

      If anyone has ideas about this, please respond. Thanks!
  • One potential software part could be the use of rdesktop, found at www.rdesktop.org. It's an RDP4 client for linux and many other unices.

    As for thin clients, I would certainly go towards the IBM route, mostly because IBM IMHO has shown itself to be linux friendly
    • I've noticed that no RDP servers exist for Linux, but is there any inherrent reason why one couldn't exist? The boys on the rdesktop team have already figured out the protocol and produced a client, is applying that knowledge to a server out of the question?

  • Have you looked at all? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @12:19PM (#2816813)
    Last time I checked, NCD, Wyse, Tektronix and IBM all sold combo X/ICA terminals. X for the Linux, ICA for the Citrix stuff and, increasingly, direct support for Windows Terminal Server.ther than Sun

    I'd be surprised if anyone in the hardware X terminal business other than Sun didn't also support at least ICA at this point.

    Another option everyone has forgotten these days is Tarantella, the SCO product, which runs as a server both under Unix (including Linux) and on Windows and can serve either kind of application via RDP and X11 if I recall.
    • Last time I checked, NCD, Wyse, Tektronix and IBM all sold combo X/ICA terminals.


      Scratch Tektronix, NCD bought them out.

    • I was using a setup which did this five years ago (wow, it really is that long ago). NCD terminals. I don't know how the hardware was setup, but we had the option of logging into an X or Citrix hacked WinNT 3.51 system. Under some priviliged accounts you could run Windows apps in a window (a resizable root window, but a window nonetheless -- and that was 5 years ago!)

  • NCD has made combo machines for years we use several here at work and they work fine (though we are 99% Citrix based). Their NCD Business Network Computers [ncd.com] line looks like exactly what you need though I don't know the price.

    Charles
  • Neoware sold many X/ICA thin clients. I think they currently have one that runs linux as it's OS as well as ones that run win2000. I haven't been watching them as much lately as I've been replacing my neostations with PC's running Linux. Neoware [neoware.com]
  • Both of these are good products. Reflection X allows you to run X windows on top of a windows client. Things like telnet and all your xwindows apps if you wish.

    Exceed also does this. You need windows on the box, but I see no reason why you cannot have CITRIX pull up a windows desktop and then have that pull up an x session through exceed.

  • Assuming you go with something that can run either windows or linux as an OS:

    Citrix has an ICA client for both Windows and for Unix. I have mainly used the one for Linux, and as far as I can tell, it works exactly as well as the one for Windows. I doubt there is much difference between the price for either.

    If you want to use Windows as a host OS, that is a decent chunk of money right there. You can certainly run X11 apps to displayed to windows using StarNet's X-Win32, Hummingbird's eXceed, or WRQ Reflection X. The last one I know supports accelerated OpenGL and I don't think the other two do. If that's important for your type of work, take that into consideration.

    If you really want good remote X11 support, though, do not use a Windows X server. Speaking from personal experience, they all have flaws. Use Linux as host OS, get the Citrix ICA Linux client, and just run X remotely when you need to. Best price/performance for sure. Plus, it gets the worker bees accustomed to the Linux desktop while using the Windows one. Makes it easier for the bait'n'switch later. ;)
  • I don't know if building your own is an option, but you can make a pretty nice "thin client" fairly cheaply with off the shelf components.

    Here's what I used:
    • Shuttle FV24 motherboard [shuttleonline.com] Flex ATX form factor, sound, video, network built on.
    • VIA C3 processors [via.com.tw]. Not as fast as some other processors, but you can use a passive heatsink instead of needing a CPU fan to cool it down ( less moving parts to break, and less noise).
    • Alpha U60-V25C [micforg.co.jp] passive heatsink.
    • Disk on module [yahoo.com]. I couldn't get the Shuttle machines to netbook from their build-in ethernet, so I added a disk on module to store the boot code (for Etherboot [sourceforge.net]). The disk on modules plug directly into the IDE slot on the motherboard and are recognized as IDE drives.
    • A small case. I cant find the one I used, but there are several Micro-ATX or Flex-ATX cases out there.


    Costs ended up being about $120 for the motherboard, $40 for the CPU, $15 for the heatsink, $50 for the disk on module, and $50 for the case, so ~$275, plus a keyboard and mouse, and the performance blew away the NetVista 2200 that I had been using.

    For software, you can run Linux on the machine and use Citrix/ICA client or Terminal Server with rdesktop. The machine is fast enough you could run Linux locally from a remote NFS file system, or you could just use it for a display. The Linux Terminal Server Project [ltsp.org] has a lot of information about setting this. You might also want to look at the Diskless Windows Cookbook [ltsp.org].
  • IBM Netstations should be able to do X, ICA, and perhaps RDP(I haven't used one in a year or so, but I'd imagine that they'd have RDP supporty by now). At one point we had about 50% of our office running on these. Over time our users' needs have changed so we've migrated away from these, but some of the other departments in my organization have a decent install base of IBM Netstations. The only gripe we had about them when we used them was the video output quality was less than great. This has probably been fixed by now though. Another option, that I have zero experiance with, might be Sun's SunRay or whatever there thin client is called. I think you can get an ICA client for it(though I have my doubts about being able to find an RDP client) and it does support X. The SunRay may have a fan also, which violates the no moving parts idea. IIRC a lot of the 'Windows' thin clients(Wyse Winterms, etc) have a fan, so you may be stuck with fans anyhow. One thing I have noticed about thin clients(and cheap 'PCs' like the Compaq iPac) is that even though they may have no, or very few, moving parts that the failure rates are still about the same as a full PC. They always seem to have cheap power supplies that give out, especially if you have crappy power at your location). You didn't mention the size of this rollout, but if it is a large one you should take a good look at the management options for the clients you buy. Some have great centralized manament options and some have none. This can make a big difference when you find you need to upgrade firmware or change the configs on a bazillion clients. Good luck with your rollout!
    • Nope, SunRays are completely solid-state (my office is covered in the things). Don't know whether anyone has got them working with a Linux server though. The video output is great, decent enough sound for the average office user too. Older ones did have a problem with dodgy resistors (? or something) in the power supply when a supplier mucked-up, but the recent ones are pretty bulletproof.
  • Why not have a X-Server running on that Citrix or MS desktop server ? Just 'emulate' the linux part using what you already have.
  • www.tuxia.com [tuxia] has a thin-client solution. Linux embedded OS, native X Windows support, Citrix Metaframe optional.

    I've seen these guys at LinuxWorld Tokyo and some other shows. They have some snazzy looking devices that will fit any "designer office". Unfortunately, last time I talked to them, they were turning more to set-top box development.

    Can't hurt to take a look.

  • Build your own (Score:4, Informative)

    by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @06:08PM (#2819769)
    Use a small Linux distro if you don't want to but any of the precooked terminals.

    TinyX [xfree86.org] handles X for Linux, Unix and BSD
    RDesktop [rdesktop.org] handles Terminal Services for NT4TSE and Windows 2000
    The Metaframe Client [citrix.com] does, obviously, Metaframe on your Windows and Solaris app servers.

  • Something I'd been doing when I didn't want to destroy a Windows installation that I might need at a later time is setup a VNC config file and run the following line in my win.ini file:

    shell=c:\software\misc\vnc\vncviewer.exe /config configfile

    This worked for me in a couple of ways:

    1) the computer boots up faster (no explorer.exe to load) and is more stable, no explorer to crash.
    2) The vnc connection settings are all stored in the config file, and I run VNC full-screen, so it's transparent to the user that it's even a virtual desktop.

    FWIW, YMMV. :-)
  • Check out rdesktop.org for a GPL RDP client that allows you to connect to a Windows Terminal Server.

    http://rdesktop.org

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