I’ve been reading up on linux servers a lot lately, and one thing I stumbled upon really interested me.
It turns out that there are several projects out there doing some terminal server kind of things. A terminal server is a server that runs applications, and even whole operating systems inside of itself for other computers connected to it over the network.
So, that means if you spend a good chunk of money on a server, you can get donated really old computers (pentium 2, 300Mhz, 32 megs of ram old), and run an entire computer lab with minimal headaches. In some cases you don’t even need a hard drive for the slow computer. Everything gets stored on the server, just as if you were physically sitting at it.
These projects I’ve been reading up on for implementing this are called the linux free terminal server project, and another thing that is similar called FreeNX (or X2 is another implementation of the same thing).
It turns out that Edubuntu (an educational targeted version of the version of linux that I use) has the server part of this built-in and enabled by default, and if you do the “light” install it automatically sets it up as a client (i.e. the slow computer part).
This isn’t a new idea or anything, but I just thought it had been ruled out years ago as a good solution for setting up a computer lab on the cheap. It turns out people are working on it still, and it has come a long way since I last heard about it.