Thin Client With OSS for Developing Nations

FridayBob writes "The BBC has a story on a new, ultra-thin client that a group of not-for-profit developers, Ndiyo, hope will open up the potential of computing to people in the developing world. Not surprisingly, their system uses open source software. The system runs Ubuntu Linux with a Gnome/KDE deskto and OpenOffice. From the article: 'Licences for software are often a significant part of expenditure for smaller companies which rely on computers. But a recent UK government study, yet to be formally published, has shown that open source software can significantly reduce school budgets dedicated to computing set-ups.'"

The third world need wireless mesh.

[Baldrson]

A better solution for the third world is a bootable cdrom image that comes up with a minimal system including:

1. Wireless mesh software and drivers from widely available and now very cheap 802.11b cards.
2. A web browser with good javascript/xsl support.

Such a bootable cdrom (based on Slackware) is already available from LocustWorld [mirror.ac.uk].

Maybe the Ubuntu guys should port it over from Slackware.

Bandwidth?

[two-tail]

Hmmm. Many many thin clients, all trying to do stuff (the same stuff) at the same times. Any bandwidth problems that could come up? I would guess that unless utilization is carefully watched, with overflow capacity readily available, it could be a problem. It would also require that the "thin server" (or maybe it's "thick server") be not too far away?

Re:The third world need wireless mesh.

[Anonymous Coward]

this is actually a flasher cdrom that will write an image to a hard driver (immediately and without much warning or fanfare)...

Re:Wow

[EinarH]

No problem. A "thin client" is a computer or terminal that displays software that is running on a server and/or is running software from a flash based disk or a CD-ROM. On most thin clients the data processing occurs on the server.
In most of the tradidtional cases a thin client is a networked computer using software such as Citrix.
The advantages (according to the Citrix folks) are cheaper clients, lower TCO and easier administrations.

Re:Yawn, Sun already has this technology

[Wesley Felter]

Too bad a Sun Ray costs more than a diskless PC.

Re:Development begins at home

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Why are these cheap entry-level systems always targeted at the "Third World", rather than poor people here in the US?

Well first off, this article is about people in the UK. These thin clients are also designed for a centralized computer center, school, or business; not home use.

Second of all, in urban areas of the US, there ARE projects like this. Unfortunately, they don't get alot of news coverage-- not sexy enough I guess. They are small, poorly funded, poorly organized, stuck in politics, stuck in government bureaucracy, and there aren't that many of them. But they do exist.

There are also projects which can help in this sort of realm:

http://www.ltsp.org/ [ltsp.org]
http://www.osef.org/ [osef.org] (They've been quiet for a while).

Looks like you are NYC, and I don't know what's available over there.

There are projects. And yes our own poor people are worth helping, but that doesn't mean you can't help the poor people in developing nations.

Re:Nonsense.

[grcumb]

"Jesus. What kind of box are you trying to buy? $1000 US? Maybe you should set your sights a little lower and realize that not everyone needs a game box."

I wasn't going to reply at first, but then I realised that you genuinely don't get it. The country where I live cannot survive on income tax revenues, because the cash economy is almost non-existent. This means that it relies on import duties, business license fees, etc. for its revenues. This means that things like computers have hugely inflated prices. PCs, for example, have a 40% duty slapped on them. Vendors also add large markups because they pay extremely high business license fees.

All this means that a low-end computer that would cost about USD 4-500 ends up costing not less than USD 1000 when it arrives here. Is it clearer now?

And stop calling me Jesus. 8^)

LTSP

[diwadm]

Here in our university [upd.edu.ph](UP), we've been using LTSP [ltsp.org] to create thin clients. We run a powerful server (2ghz, 1gb ram) and it can host up to 20 Pentium computers.

What's nice about the thin client setup is that once an application is loaded, it boots really fast on all the clients. For instance, we start OpenOffice on the server and it boots with a second on a client.

Another advantage with this setup is control. Since all the clients run on the server, we can restrict access and prioritize security.

OT as usual

[rathehun]

As I have mentioned earlier, the point of these stories is often lost on slashdot. I'm not complaining, just saying so.

The truth is that in "third world" countries, bare bones PCs that run your choice of Windows or Linux simply don't cost a hell of a lot more than $100, and often less.

Saeed, where do you live? I live in India, I volunteer at Oxfam in their appropriate technology department, and we have been unable to get boxes - el cheepo, second-hand K6-2s for less than USD 200, with a decent monitor and with a customised, translated version of Linux (free). I would really be interested in the boxes you're talking about, so please do get back to me. Of course, I'm assuming that you're commenting in good faith, not as the nasty troll thing that I keep hearing about!

The solution that eventually occured was that IBM donated a number of G40e laptops (thank you guys!) so we were able to put low-power, fancy computers out in the field.

Now the crux of the issue to me, and this is something which I've brought up earlier, so bear with me, is the question, Now What?

I've got a 2.8 gig 802.11g machine with 512 MB of RAM sitting here, doing what?

The hard part is making it useful. Not many people out in the villages enjoy reading slashdot regularly, so we have to find useful things that they can use these beasts for.

Essentially, what we did was to create an information portal, data was downloaded every day over a CDMA 1x connection, and presented in a form which was accesible to people. Weather forecasts, crop and vegetable prices, information about government schemes, employment opportunities in the nearest town and so on. If you want to know more, then drop me a mail and I would be happy to give you full details. Better yet, if you are involved in something similiar, please do get in touch.

Now the technology part is cool. I designed it to work completely in our favourite browser - Firefox - *ducks*, I used CSS to make sure that when you print out the information it's in an easy to read form. Also, since Open Office, FF, the Linux distro itself a number of other applications have recently been translated into the local language (Tamil) it has been easy for the people themselves to use it, rather than needing either an external person, or to have to painfully learn a new language.
Just to quickly respond to the infrastructure part, India has been really good at providing communications infrastructure at a grassroots level. Every village is linked with a 2 mbps pipe, and wireless internet using CDMA is fairly easily available. This is a god-send for us, who want to put an IT project in, without having to build this stuff up from scratch. I speak from experience in Indonesia, where we had to transmit using VHF. Fuck, that hurt.

Now sub-$100 machines are good. But, like someone else was saying here, the people themselves are NOT going to be buying this. It's more likely to be governements, NGOs and the like who do bulk-purchases and then provide them in conjuntion with various other schemes. Remember that in many parts of the world the annual income is less than $350. This is equivalent to somebody paying about $13'000 for a computer in the US (if they earn about $40k, which I assume an IT manager will).

The technology is cool for us. How useful is it for them?

R.

Re:The third world need wireless mesh.

[vhogemann]

Huh?

Now, I'm pretty sure that there are places that are just like you described... but I guess it's not a rule.

See, I live at Brasil... we're on the third world, but we're also a democracy, as every other country here at South America.

And we know how to grow crops very well, indeed our governament agency for agriculture, EMBRAPA, develloped some amazing stuff like plague resistant varieties of a number of vegetables, that are also more productive. And agriculture is an industry around here, we have a high production of cereals, and export it to the 4 corners of the world.

As for housing and public shcools, things could be better... but we got some amazing stuff going on Curitiba like the project Four Head [ http://www.c3sl.ufpr.br/multiterminal/index-en.php [c3sl.ufpr.br] ]

So, I think that we could use some public wireless networking here. We can use also some more computers, like that AMD PIC, and Open Source software.

Re:RTFA

[wwwillem]

This is a clone of the SunRay solution (see here [sun.com]). With SunRay's you use a smartcard to access, which has the cool feature, that you can pull your card from the thin client, walk over to another (to discuss something with a colleague, to give a preso in the boardroom, to go home even!!) and plug your card into another SunRay, where your session continues as if nothing had happened.

Re:FPGAs vs. SOCs- from a FPGA Engineer

[mrand]

And, FPGAs are really useful as an implementation, not just for prototyping. It can cost up to $30M to set up an ASIC line, not counting engineering or the $100K+ for the tools ...

Yep, some FPGA's are cheap enough that they can be used for both prototyping and production. But comparing one of the least expensive FPGA's in the world with a near maximum "up to" price for ASIC development is not useful. And yes, I'm an FPGA engineer as well (waiting impatiently for 7.1.2i to be released), so I'm not saying this for my love of ASIC's.

Competitive ASIC's can be developed for WELL under $1M (probably even well under $500k for a good number of devices) including tools and NRE/prototype costs. Still doesn't remove the fact that it takes considerable volume to come out ahead against a $7 FPGA. Against a 2VP50, at closing in on $1k a piece, it's a completely different story.