Hi Paul, At the risk of proving I am no expert on this.... The choice of a thin client (low bandwidth) LINUX SERVER is limited. Are you thinking of deploying M$ products? If so then I don't know of a way to do this from a Linux box. If you are using Windoze based apps then perhaps Citrix will is not required; too expensive, but there is evidence that it works (to a point). The Windows 2k thin client server route has improved over the NT4 version and is cheaper. An ICA client (Citrix type) is available on Linux and works very well but needs a M$ server. Watch out for the cost of licenses with all the commercial solutions - it may not be as cheap as you fist think to deploy thin clients. Thick clients (higher bandwidth) work well and could be very cost effective. There is a lot of info about configuring X-based apps in a distributed environment. What about wordperfect and Staroffice? Anyone have a view on this? -----Original Message----- From: `paul [mailto:smartart@cableinet.co.uk] Sent: 13 September 2000 21:22 To: suse-linux-uk-schools@suse.com Cc: Malcolm Herbert; Schools List Subject: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Advice please Hi Everyone, I need the benefit of your wiser and more experienced heads please. I'm acting up as HoD (unpaid, alas) and I've managed to talk the senior DH into giving me some money. I've been given up to ?7K to do away from a room full of equipment. The current room has 25 i333MHZ PCs, on 10MB BNC. network is a queer mix of 2 x Novell 3.12 servers, with an NT proxy & Wins server. The clients run under Win98. I was telling the boss about how old kit could recycled using a thin client and he said if I can get the job done for ?7K, I can go ahead. He would like to be able to free up 12 machines to re-distributed around the school. Obviously I'd like to get a Linux box in there as the main server for the thin client end. Now, I could go down the Citrx route - if I can ever afford the licences, but what about having another server and using VNC, VMWare or even Wine. But I haven't got any experience with any of it, apart from the 30 days when I ran VMWare on my own SuSE machine. Can I do the job with only ?7K: new server, CAT5 cabling, (thin client) licences, probably more memory for each machine, new NICs and so on. Any ideas or advice would be very gratefully received. If I do a good job then there's a small showcase for other schools in the LEA, the bosses get to swank at other schools' bosses about what the school's done, SuSE gets to sell my school a half-price copy of v7.0 ;-) and maybe I increase my chances of a permanent FT position in January 2001. TIA Paul Hornshaw