When I use the term X-terminal I am talking about running a (small) local OS on a machine that basically has a base linux system, networking and X. It is NOT booting off of a remote computer it is running as a terminal that is running X (therefore the name X-terminal) that is operating only as a display device. With X-terminals all applications and storage are on your server, which I like to call the application server.

When true1ever uses the term thin-client he is talking about the same thing as I am, in linux or unix terms what we are doing is generally called running X-terminals. I think that the term thin-client can actually be used in both an X-terminal system and also a LTSP or knoppix terminal-session for the terminal device.

The difference is X-terminals are functioning as display devices attached to a remote computer, the application server.

With remote booting LTSP or knoppix terminal-server, the terminals are more than just a terminal, they are running the full linux operating system (which is on the server), they are not just display devices, they have to be capable of running the entire OS.

A.J.G. I've gone through this before with you about hardware, it depends on how many users and what you are doing. A 1GB machine with 512MB of ram and a large swap partition 256 or larger on a fast network should easily support 12 or so users depending on what you are doing, you'll have to experiment. A friend's business which uses star-office for microsoft office docs, netscape, etc. runs at least 6 users and is running off of a 200Mhz machine with 160MB of ram.

In an hour you could set up one of your existing labs with knoppix runnning entirely from cd doing what we are discussing here. Try it and see how it works, that would be the best thing for you to do at this point. Then realize that with a hd install it would be faster.

rock