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.'"

interesting approach

[Anonymous Coward]

I read their white paper. It's not a diskless boot setup. Rather it sends the screen image over Ethernet.

FPGAs vs. SOCs

[Wesley Felter]

I wonder if their FPGA-based design is really cheaper than using a Geode or Xilleon.

Re:RTFA

[NtroP]

We have one location with over 200 thin-clients on a 100Mb network. The impact is minimal. With QoS and propper VLANing you can to much more than that. Just web-surfing and email take up more bandwidth than the thin-client traffic on that network.

Re:Development begins at home

[kiore]

Perhaps because this system is being developed in the UK where they have a long tradition of developing cheaper computers. Clive Sinclair, Alan Sugar, and many of their emulators hail from there. The simputer was IIRC developed in India, which is in the third world.

Re:More of the same NON-SOLUTION.

[grcumb]

"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."

Welcome to the land of Generalisation, where one anecdotal observation trumps any need for actual data!

Sorry to be so crude, but what you're saying is so hopelessly wrong that it just about made me jump out of my chair. How do I know it's wrong? Because I'm sitting right now in a developing nation that adds a 40% duty to all imported computer goods. I cannot buy a new PC of any kind for less than USD 1000. (That's about 6 times the legal monthly minimum wage.)

I've spoken with officials from the department of trade, and they've been extremely receptive to the fact that high computing costs are a huge barrier to development. In fact, they're in the process of lowering those barriers. But even then, the best we could expect would be a roughly $4-500 computer, which still represents a huge amount of money for the average person. When you're earning very little money, every dollar has to count.

So guess what? We used 8 year-old Pentiums to operate as thin clients to connect to 'modern' PIII 450s running Ubuntu. Here's the press release [www.news.vu] we just published.

In fairness, there are a number of countries where computer hardware is cheap. But the fact that some developing countries have cheap computers does not mean that 'the developing world has cheap computers'.

Re: Thin clients cheap?

[Alwin Henseler]

First, the client can be really bare bones (i.e. no HD, minimal RAM, low-end graphics, low processesor speeds, etc) so they can be cheap ($170 + monitor from WalMart or donated machines).

Yep, thin clients are great, when used in the right places. And they have many advantages. But... price isn't one of them. Not yet, anyway.

Where I live, PC's up to around 200 MHz. (original Pentium and below) are effectively free. You want one? Look around, hand over a sixpack of beer, and you have one.

Now with a $170 budget, I can get you a (used) PC that includes monitor, and beats the crap out of any thin client you can find for same money.

How come? Well, we all know electronics today are 'cheap' thanks to the sheer numbers they're produced in. Apparantly in today's world, a standard beige box with off-the-shelf components, is still cheaper (to produce, or second-hand), than a book-sized thin client produced in limited numbers.

For a business, the numbers may differ. If you'd use old hardware in a thin-client like fashion, you might have to hire someone, to manage parts, build and repair boxes fulltime. In that scenario, it may be cheaper to spend $170 once on thin clients, and very little after that on managing the hardware. But the savings here are not hardware, but management costs. Which I think is the advantage of thin clients anyway.

I hope some day (maybe soon) these economics will change, and make smaller/smarter boxes cheaper than equal performing WalMart beige boxes. Because they have many advantages, and I happen to like small+smart boxes. Even if they're still a bit bigger, like Mini-ITX or Shuttle XPC's.

Re:The third world need wireless mesh.

[homer_s]

So, a poster here at Slashdot knows more about the needs of the "third world" than the people who live and work there. Hmmm, maybe you should just stick to Soviet Russia and Korea.

Re:Development begins at home

[jcorgan]

Aren't our own poor people worth helping?

There sure is a lot of us vs. them in your comment.

Personally, I am a citizen of the world--the extent to which I feel charitable toward the poor does not follow along national government borders.

If "our" poor are worth helping, what are you doing to help them?

Re:Development begins at home

[Doc Ruby]

I care more about my neighbors than about your neighbors. It's economics and basic recognition of how human empathy actually works in practice. I work with the NY City Council, frequently advising how tech can create opportunities for disadvantaged people. I spend hundreds, thousands of hours a year doing that, which affects literally millions of my poor neighbors directly, and millions farther away indirectly, by example. What do you do, other than posting holier-than-thou comments to Slashdot?

Re:interesting approach

[Daengbo]

In order for X to work here, they would need an X server on the machine. With no system RAM and only 2MB of VRAM, no CPU and only an FGPU, I rather suspect that it's how they claim, and the pixmap for the whole screen is transported across the LAN. A look at their bandwidth graph supports this idea.

Everyone else is trying to minimize the bandwidth use by moving to servers like NX, but these guys are going the opposite direction.

Re:Development begins at home

[melonman]

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

Because, for many users, this sort of technology just cannot deliver the user experience they want.

I've spent 3.5 years running a cybercafe in France that sounds remarkably like their proposed setup - 10 diskless terminals connected to a fast Linux server. For many things it's fine. But try watching a realplayer video over a remote X session and watch the network saturate. This proposal uses gigabit cards. OK, that will help a bit, but you still hit a wall with many applications. Note that whatever whizzy (read "expensive") switch gear you have, all the packets either start from or go to the same NIC on the same server, and, ultimately, that's your bottleneck.

If you have 200 terminals, as the article suggests, that means 5Mbit/sec uncontended bandwidth per terminal, assuming your gigabit setup will run smoothly at 100% load. 2Mbit/sec sounds more likely to me. Try running X over a flakey 802.11b connection and you may spot the problem.

This will work fine for WP and text-based browsing (the size of OO is a red herring as it lives on the server, not the client). But any kind of large bitmapped image, let alone animation, will kill it.

Yes, yes, I know, this is not X, it's sending pixel images. So it's doing more or less what Citrix does. Try opening an image of random pixels full-screen over a Citrix session and watch the system hang for several seconds.

There's no way around the basic facts. Networks are much slower than hard discs. You can compress a lot of images very efficiently, and you can optimise your compression to handle GUI furniture and so on, but arbitary graphical data doesn't compress well, and the time taken to send it is simply the size of the compressed image divided by the network bandwidth. And the much-touted dumbness of the terminal radically reduces your options for context-sensitive compression.

In other words, it's a low-price solution offering a low-comfort user experience. The assumption tends to be that "poor people" are simple souls who will settle for basic services. Apart from being somewhat patronising, that assumption just doesn't tie up with my experience. Poverty tends to correlate with limited education and limited experience of computer systems. Poor people expect everything to "just work", and are not going to be pleased to learn that they can't use certain sites because of some technical consideration.

Incidentally, my experience suggests that they are also more likely to have trouble using any software other than whatever software they have used before (inevitably Windows), so expect lots of support calls about switching from MSN to GAIM, for example. And, yes, Africans do use Instant Messaging a lot if they can, as it's much much cheaper than international phone calls.

Re: Thin clients cheap?

[hedora]

Where I live, PC's up to around 200 MHz. (original Pentium and below) are effectively free. You want one? Look around, hand over a sixpack of beer, and you have one.

Now with a $170 budget, I can get you a (used) PC that includes monitor, and beats the crap out of any thin client you can find for same money.

I thought this until I tried it with my old 366MHz laptop. VNC at 1024x768 was sort of tolerable with an 8-bit color depth after I messed around with compression options. The problem is that the system is too slow to (a) uncompress highly compressed data and (b) to utilize enough of the 100MBit connection to handle an uncompressed stream. There is a sweet spot between a and b, but it's kind of hard to find. I didn't try windows terminal server, since the server was a linux system. Synchronous protocols like X11 (LBX) or NX were totally unusable.

NX is great for running over slow connections (sub-cable modem), but it doesn't seem to drop frames if the CPU can't keep up... I don't know though, I'm not an expert in this stuff.

Anyway, it looks like the big advantage of the Ndiyol is that they've done a lot of work to come up with a custom protocol and/or cheap hardware set-up that actually work out of the box for $170. I noticed that they ship with 2MB of RAM. Also, they plan to move the whole thing on to one chip... that should cut cost significantly.

If they can get full screen video streaming + sound to work, and provide a connector that lets me plug in a remote control, I'm putting one of these in my living room. Assuming that it can run in hot environments, it would outperform all of the sub $2,000 systems that I've been able to find on the market these days.

(I've been trying to find something that can run as a mythtv frontend, and be silent, small and stable in a 95F room. There are probably some systems out there, but it is really hard to find out the operating temperature range or noise level of prebuilt computer systems.)