On 19/07/10 16:10, pmgazz wrote: > P3s run great as thin clients (just need a pxe card) and the ubiquitous > P3 compaqs have them already. But if people haven't got any money at > all, the the LTSP option is a stretch as they need at least one halfway > decent machine - but if they can stump up a couple of hundred quid for a > basic dual-core with 2GB+ RAM it'll work great. >
Yep, we were lucky with the installation in Exeter, I was working for a local radio station who had a charitable trust and I was able to help the community centre get some funding to buy some monitors and a server. Sadly this charity is no longer running. In the current project we're working on we've had a donation of a Xeon server. It's not the fastest server ever but it's a dual CPU capable server (Netburst Xeon) and upgradable so for now they might have to make do with getting some cheap memory and upgrading it to 2GB and maybe adding an extra CPU (or upgrade the existing 2.4GHz CPU to two 3GHz CPUs). > I've tried using single-cores (AMD Sempron and various Intel) with 1GB > RAM and it sort of works OK but you get a hellish lag if 3+ people use > OOo at the same time - which isn't great for a production environment. > OK if all people will do is surf the web though. Yep, the one thing I have found even with a fast server and dedicated 100Mbit to each client, things like Flash do run a bit slowly, well things like Youtube do. I'm guessing it's because there's a lot of data being shifted about (this was with 6 clients at 100Mbit each attached to a Gigabit switch (the server has a Gigabit port on it). > P3s can't run Xubuntu standalone for any sensible use - even the first > generation XP PCs can't without a RAM upgrade (any P4 will do but 512 is > the min RAM if you don't want to have time to make and drink a cuppa > each time you open an OOo doc) - and a gig is more like it if you ask > me. Again, you can get away with Xubuntu standalone on P4 with 256 MB > RAM as long as no-one's going to try to get much more ambitious than > surfing the web. > Actually I installed Xubuntu on a P3 800 laptop with 192MB Ram and it wasn't too bad. Okay it was slow with Flash and Youtube was pretty much unwatchable but for web browsing and Abiword it was reasonably okay. If I was going to be giving out standalone machines though I'd probably try and give out at least P4 or Athlon XP's with 512MB (or more) memory. I've done two of these in the past, an Athlon XP 1700+ with 512MB Ram for a friend's mother (now running Ubuntu 9.10) which works fine (little bit slow at times but works fine for what she wants, Word Processing, Internet browsing and Skype) and an Athlon XP 2000+ with 640MB Ram for a local community project, again runs fine for what they want. Later on I'm going to be sorting a PC out for the kids, it's a bit better spec, Celeron 3.33GHz (I've mislaid my P4 2.8), 1.25GB Ram running Ubuntu 10.04 probably. I'm even going to give Userful a try for multi-seat (I figured I can turn the machine into 2 PCs and stop the kids squabbling). > Older than that and it's <gulp> Puppy . . . or a custom Debian desktop. > I tried a custom Debian desktop once, for the folks who I gave Xubuntu to (on the P3 800's) and somehow they managed to break it within a day. :-) Next time I do anything on any older hardware I'm going to give Peppermint Linux a try, it looks to be better matched to old hardware as it runs LXDE. Rob -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
