--- Miles Berry wrote:

I've just been asked to draft a proposal for /possibly/ setting up a 2nd

IT room here at St Ives. Unfortunately, the preliminary figures will be needed by 4/5/05!

No rush, then.

The thin client option seems quite appealing, but I'd prefer KDE desktops, even though this may place a lot of extra load on the poor application server, and obviously would want to run things like Office software, and web-browsing; I'd also like to be able to run rosegarden and gimp(!)

Then you would find with concurrent access that things would be very slow indeed. So one option you have is to image the disk at every reboot. I realise a thin-client typically runs everything on the server, and displays output on the client, but this is often unappropriate in some instances. What LTSP does do, is allow these thin clients to do some of the work their end. It has been a while since I played with LTSP, but the concept of having a small root partition image which is installed at each reboot is nothing new. Indeed, what you could do is just image across the KDE binaries -- X11 is a client/server technology anyway. so it doesn't have to be installed locally in any way. In so doing, of course, you decentralise the processing of KDE to the thin-clients [1], allowing the server to handle concurrent access of applications such as OO, The Gimp, etc. Or alternatively, you buy another server which handles KDE, although how anything can handle KDE is a miracle in itself. :) If you'd like more details I can supply them, although it might take me a day or two to get back to you -- I am beyond swamped with University work at the moment. -- Thomas Adam [1] Whether they're now thin-clients or not is debatable. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com