Hi,
Just joined the list after reading gdk's mail on the roll-call followup. Adding to what Paul (Nelson) wrote about calling the sales reps directly, that an experience I share as well.
About 3 years back, I was consulting with a client (an University) that wanted to set up a 100 node, multi-media enabled ltsp-based system. This was a brand new setup and hence we didn't have any old h/w laying around for re-deployment. We tried to get Celeron based systems, but none of the MNC vendors were ready to ship systems without HDDs or optical drives. Local brands/vendors/assemblers didn't just didn't have a clue. Even local Intel couldn't help us here in sourcing.
The scenario on the ground hasn't changed much even today... Fedora Core/RHEL/SLES/Ubuntu they all know how to do a regular install... but *LTSP? Forget it... and that from local system integrators doing an annual business over USD 10 million. FWIW, even today in Kolkata/Calcutta, there are only 2 such vendors who know how to setup *LTSP, despite the fact that it mostly-just-works (tm) these days.
The only way we could get LTSP terminal hardware as per our spec (no HDD/CDROM/FDD) together was by buying up 100 old systems (mostly Dell and IBM) that were being imported and sold by local vendors as refurbished systems. IBM xSeries boxes served as the servers. Even after 2.5 years of deployments, the systems are running as stable as ever, with almost zero admin costs. The servers of course had gone from FC3 to FC4 and then to FC6.
cheers
-indra
--
Indranil Das Gupta
Chief Technology Architect
L2C2 Technologies
E-Mail : indradg@xxxxxxxxxx
Phone : +91-98300-20971
WWW : http://www.l2c2.co.in
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