10th meeting

From BLUG

internet malls clare naylor oregon pesticide applicators license best massage chair adipex refill kate playground free videos anti war larkspur apartment nyc power defrag 3.02a serial maintenance services phil collins another day in paradise video return of the mac song pa female strippers la bamba movie lyrics sport movie posters last minute steganos crack in movie sexy shakeela tamil michal jackson aeroplane video clips mystic fox bouncing off the walls california numismatic investments escort free model movie russian karaoke store immigrant visa attorney url promosoft crack tracy ross sunset academic software licensing vic4tracch Topic: Linux Terminal Server Project
Date: August 9th, 2005
Time: 7-9pm
Location: Monroe County Public Library room 1B

Attendance: 21 (record attendance)
Presenters: Robert Piercy

Synopsis

Summary: "Linux Terminal Services" - Robert Piercy will be giving a demonstration of using Linux Terminal Services, which allows you to connect many Linux "thin clients" to one master server.

Our meetings are traditionally held on the 2nd Tuesday of each month in conference room 1B of the Monroe County Public Library. Meetings start at 7pm and sometimes pizza and drinks are served.

Post meeting summary

People just kept filling into the most successful BLUG meeting ever. 21 people!!! Including about 8 new people.

Robert gave a very enlightening look into the world of terminal services under Linux. He had three computers setup, one as the terminal server, which is where the applications run. Another computer was setup to be the terminal, which used the X protocol to display applications and handle input from the keyboard and mouse. Robert had a lot of insight as to why this project is so important and is becoming very popular lately with larger organizations as well as smaller ones too. The cost savings for 20 computers can be in the high thousands of dollars and without any significant loss in functionality.

Let's say that you need to deploy 10 workstations in your office. Instead of buying 10 expensive workstations just to run word processing, email, web browsers and spreadsheets, you could run one main terminal server machine and 10 inexpensive "thin clients" that make a terminal connection through the X protocol. Each user would have their own graphical login to the server and be able to run all these common desktop applications. Each terminal can be used from an existing computer up to about 10 years old and the server only needs to be a dual processor machine with 1 or 2GB of ram. So you wind up with a total cost of $2000 + $200*10 or about $4000 for the total setup. Compare this with buying 10 $500 or $1000 workstations and you wind up with $1000 to $6000 savings on just 10 employees. Now imagine having 100-1000 employees. Millions can be saved and older computers can be used instead of thrown out.

Here are some LTSP resources you can check out. LTSP just won the "Best of Show" award at this year's LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco. Congradulations to Jim McQuillen and the entire LTSP project team!

After the presentation we talked about the increased technology activity and events going on in Bloomington and talked amongst each other.