Today proved successful for Holmfirth. We managed to get the opportunity to evaluate three different models of thin clients, the HP t5125 the IGEL 2110 and IGEL 3210. I look forward to setting up our first mini thin client network.

I was advised by a friendly woman from Thin Store which model would better suit our needs.
My first requirement was the size, it had to fit on the back of a monitor. My second was its ability to boot from the network - this feature was called PXE. My final requirement was it's cost.

I was recommended the 3 models and was told they would all fit on the back of a monitor, although size is not too important at this stage.

Our aim would be to scale down in size as much as possible given a budget of between £100 - £200. An overall budget of £250 - £350 per machine would be realistic given the price of monitor, keyboard, mouse and cables. 4 computers could be purchased for £1000, this price will only decrease given time. At this stage I'd like to experiment with LTSP. I've looked into using an open source operating system called Ubuntu Linux, this has a tremendous amount of support and is of course without any added license fees.

I've previously installed Ubuntu Server on a Pentium 4, 1GB Ram PC @ nabb. As yet I have not setup LTSP. I have recently discovered that the server version of Ubuntu is unnecessary so have installed Ubuntu as well in a dual boot fashion. This can later be amended.

Now I look forward to reading through various resources to get the system working and start experimenting. Information on setting such a system up is available given google keywords 'ubuntu' and 'ltsp'

Thin client models
HP t5125
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-12454-321959-338927-89307-472257.html
IGEL 2110
http://www.igel.com/igel_rubrik/powerslave,id,52,nodeid,52,p,0,_language,en.html

IGEL 3210
http://www.igel.com/igel_rubrik/powerslave,id,53,nodeid,53,p,0,_language,en.html

Thin client sales
http://www.thinstore.net/

PXE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preboot_Execution_Environment

LTSP
http://www.ltsp.org

Ubuntu Linux
http://www.ubuntu.com