On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Vijai Ganapathy <vijai.ganapa...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Budget is really tight as all the money coming from my pocket. I was > thinking about below configuration. > > 1. AMD Athlon II X2 260 + Gigabyte GA-78LMT-S2P + HDD + 4 GB Ram > As you may have already found out, hard disk prices have shot up 2x in the past 6 months. So 10 x ~Rs.4000 == ~Rs.40,000/- just for your hard disks. I too had a similar need for 15 client systems for educational purposes. I decided to do away with hard disks and go with the thin client model not only due to price but also for other ease of maintenance, ease of expansion and consolidation reasons. Yes, it requires care on the server side but as Arun Khan and others have already pointed out on this thread, a combination of solutions (Virtualization + RAID + LTSP) can give you a better deal in terms of maintainability as well as cost. I now use openVZ for virtualized server access - students ssh into it and do all sorts of experimenting there. > > or > > 2. Intel Atom D525 based system. > D525MW isn't in production anymore, according to ritchie street vendors. You may want to double check this information. I too wanted D525 (because it has a gigabit ethernet onboard) but settled with D425KT (only 10/100) because that is what was available. Also, D525 is dual core, whereas D425 is single core. Not that it matters so much for thin clients, but we never know how we'd end up using our hardware in the future! > Heard that Atom based system are not really facinating to work from > few users. Can someone throw light on this. > Atom based systems are pretty good for thin clients. Also, by using a kill-a-watt someone measured 22W on an atom based thin client - so that makes two thin clients consume roughly about 1 tube light's worth power :) You get to save so much on stuff that conventional solutions tend to externalize (electricity bills, cooling needs, UPS, etc.,) edubuntu's in-built LTSP server solution is just _out of the box_ (as opposed to what someone here said earlier that LTSP will require "shelling out extra bucks for someone else's consultation"[1]). Just install edubuntu server, choose "LTSP" during install, connect your thin clients and make them PXEboot - voila, you've got N systems up and running GNU/Linux without any extra effort from you (well, one extra click!) > Also need your suggestion on the HW config and keep in mind that my > budget is really tight. > I asked on the list first: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/pipermail/ilugc/2011-November/068875.html ... and documented my experiences here: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.ilugc/73548 HTH. regards, -suraj [1] http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/pipermail/ilugc/2011-December/068898.html -- Career Gear - Industry Driven Talent Factory http://careergear.in/ _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
