Resurrect old PCs as thin-clients

When we first started looking at thin-client computing, we bought a few Wyse terminals. Our initial test worked out well. The Wyse boxes were lower cost than buying new PCs, and the response was good for the applications we planned to run on the terminal server. But the terminals run around $300 each. I figured there had to be a cheaper way to do it.

Most of our workstations are still 933 and 1000 MHz Pentium III Dell machines with 256 MB of RAM. They’re getting a little too old and slow to handle the newer apps, like Microsoft Office 2003 along with our in-house instant messenger and intranet apps. I started looking around for a DOS-based RDP client to use and found one. But it was commercial software and not particularly robust. I knew there had to be a Linux-based solution out there somewhere.

First I found Thinstation. It works great. You can download a prebuilt image or a Live CD. Or you can download the whole package and customize which pieces you need. It can run from the network (PXE) or installed on a hard drive. Our initial testing with Thinstation worked very well even with only 128 MB of RAM in the PC hardware. Once we progressed to a bigger test group though, we found that there were some drivers for newer ethernet hardware that were not included, simply because the kernel version in Thinstation was not the most recent. As a result of bad timing, it happened that Thinstation’s website went through some troubles and I was not able to find answers or a new release for several weeks.

During that time, I looked around for other solutions. I found DIET-PC. DIET-PC is not a “run right out of the box” type of package, but it’s very modular and gives you the ingredients you need to “roll your own” thin-client distribution. I was able to compile my own kernel with just the options and drivers I needed. (I have been compiling Linux kernels since 0.99, but hadn’t done so in a couple of years. Boy, is there a lot of stuff in there now!) Once I got the kernel just the way I wanted it, and instructed DIET-PC’s build process to only include the software I needed, the compressed filesystem image ended up being a third of the size of Thinstation. I was even able to download a development environment for DIET-PC to compile and include an application that wasn’t included in the distribution kit.

Now, I’m not bashing on Thinstation. They’ve got a new version out that includes a recent 2.6 kernel that probably has the drivers I need. And I admit I haven’t spent too much time with their build process to see just how I can customize it. I just happened to spend more time with DIET-PC. And that’s what we’re rolling out for our next test.