On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 3:55 PM, Jason D. Clinton <me@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 08:56, Christian Weiß <christian.weisz@xxxxxxx> > wrote: >> >> Consider an installation of about ~600 low budget thin-clients (with >> almost no 3D support from the graphics chip) running as X-Terminals. Those >> thin-client stations are serviced by a host computer for 25-30 stations >> each. This infrastructure should be the basis of an architectural/interior >> planning system with serious demands in terms of 3D rendering. It's all >> clear that the client hardware will not be able to provide the power, so it >> comes down to a server-based rendering approach. > > While your willingness to fund this kind of development is laudable, this > sounds rather like an organization doing LTSP and grappling with the > widespread proliferation of compositing window managers. If that's the case, > you should probably reevaluate the current state of thin client hardware. > Four years ago, when I last did this work, thin clients with 512MB of RAM > and an 945 Intel graphics chip were widely available for under $300. I'm > sure that things have improved. Any modern Intel graphics chipset >965 is > more than enough to run a compositor and 512 MB is plenty of RAM for a > desktop shell. This is essentially what Dave Richards at City of Largo is > doing. > > The best way to run things in this configuration is to make the thin clients > root from NFS root or run a Live-CD like image on them and then run a script > in rc.local which drops your own customized .desktop files in > ~/.local/share/applications in the Live user's home directory. These > .desktop files Exec= lines are SSH w/ remote X11 forwarding back to your > application servers. For example: Exec="ssh $username@libreoffice-server -Y > /usr/bin/oowriter". > > It does require a little bit of initial scripting and figuring out how to > handle user accounts is specific to your environment but it puts all that > computing power on the thin clients, including their 3D hardware, to use. > When I last did this, I used ~/.local/share/autostart shell script to launch > a username and password prompt after the desktop was up to mount directories > and make the SSH w/ username links proper. > > The other way to go about it is to get thin clients with 2GB of RAM and no > harddisk and just boot NFS root and run them as full-blown disk-less > workstations. Then all you need is a big file server. And less bandwidth > than LTSP requires (which is a huge plus.) The biggest issue I see in that is that most thin style corp deployments now days are moving towards (or at least looking closely at) a VDI style deployment and most of those techs don't support 3D either. Peter -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
