Benjamin Green wrote:
Aside from the practicalities of getting this up and running, wich
sounds possible, wouldn't running Windows under VMware as a local app
be incredibly slow? Essentially each thin client would need to be very
powerful, so missing the point of the thin part. Sorry to appear
dismissive, perhaps I am missing something?
Why not WINE or rdesktop then?
Good questions, Ben. It happens that the clients I have available to me
for this project are new pc's, with a decent amount of memory and a fast
processor.
Perhaps I can answer your question, as well as some of the others
introduced in this thread, with a further description of what I hope to do.
We currently have 40 or so Windows applications that we need to support
in an academic lab setting. Additionally, I have a culture of users
that expects to have a Windows desktop available to them when they sit
down to do their work. Even if I could get all of the applications
running with WINE (which my limited experience with WINE informs me that
I could _not_ do), there is still the culture/expectation issue to deal
with. It is my hope to be able to offer the user a decent choice at the
desktop--either they can sit down and do most of what they need to do in
the GNOME desktop, with Firefox and OpenOffice, etc., or, for the
specialized software, or if they simply prefer it, they can use the
Windows desktop.
The reason that I'm not considering rdesktop is because I also need to
support some level of end-user application install. If a student brings
in a CD that came with a textbook that's required for a class, they
don't have their own computer to run it on, I need to provide a place
where they can install and make use of the software on the CD. I
believe VMWare Player will be a better solution than rdesktop in this
case, as I can set the virtual disk to be run in persistent mode--then
they can make whatever changes they need, but the changes will not last
past a reboot. Or, if need be, I can keep an extra copy of the VM on
the hard disk, and copy that over the changed one periodically. I'm
still not sure how I'll set that up. Besides, if I have to run
rdesktop, that's a Windows _server_ I will have to support, and I
succeeded in working myself out of Windows server support a couple of
years ago.
Currently I have a bunch of Windows pc's that I support in this
environment, using a combination of Novell's Zenworks imaging and a
great, but abandoned, product, PCRdist. I use Zenworks to image the
PC's originally, then use PCRdist to keep them up to date, roll back
changes, push apps, etc. This works well, although when I have multiple
iterations of hardware to support, it gets more complicated. It can
also take a while to ready an application to push out with PCRdist, and
I always wonder with each new version of Windows whether PCRdist is
still going to work, as it hasn't been actively developed since 2002.
If I have one virtual machine image I can push out to the clients
overnight via rsync or something, whenever I make a change, that would
improve the Windows management side of the house.
I've been trying to get this whole thin-client concept and linux a
little further in the door for a number of years. Even if the clients
themselves are not yet thin (responding to Ben's original question), I
may be able to introduce linux to a few more computer users, and,
hopefully, simplify the management of the Windows desktop.
William Man, thanks for the heads-up about Qemu. I will be looking into
that. In the LTSP solution, I can plop down whatever hardware I want,
with only an empty ext3 partition on the hard-drive, which should be
much easier to manage than a standalone linux distro.
Chris Fanning, I hope to eventually make use of Xen whenever they
officially support Windows. I'm pretty attached to VMWare, having used
Workstation for a number of years. Also VMWare is pretty heavily
supported here on campus.
These are my humble goals. Further thoughts, anyone?
--
Jeff Beaird
Systems and Technological Services
Buswell Memorial Library
Wheaton College
Wheaton, IL
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