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WYSE uses Linux for thin clients 62

Posted by Hemos from the beaten-out-the-coffee dept.
Denovous writes "WYSE is apparently producing a new Linux thin client based upon the Slackware distribution, instead of Java as originally planned. The client can be started without a network, as the OS resides in 8.5 MB of memory. Check the article out here "
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WYSE uses Linux for thin clients More

WYSE uses Linux for thin clients

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  • Does any one else find it ironic that one of the adverts above and below the article is for Windows Beta 3? If you are interested in a Linux thin client you certainly are not looking for an unfinished bloatware desktop which you get to pay to find bugs in.

    Well I thought it was ironic.
  • Granted, thin clients are clients, and not stand-alone devices, but the first poster has a point: Why pay $800 for a box that is essentially a processor, memory, monitor and keyboard, when a fully-functional box with a CD drive and a massive hard drive can be had for far less?

    Dell talked about selling something similar (though that was 2 / 2.5 yrs ago), but it would have run Windows, because Dell hadn't wised up to Linux at that point. I don't think they ever really got made, but the concept is the same as these WYSE terminals ... diskless / floppy-less workstations, bootable over a network and designed for easy administration / uniformity in corporate environments.

    I asked the same question then (working for an ad agency and thereby for Dell) and still have never gotten a really good answer why it would be better to pay more for fewer / lesser components. If I can get a PII with 64MB of RAM, an 8GB hard drive, a 15" monitor and a NIC for $600 (realistic? too conservative? too hopeful?) right now, I could use the hard drive, floppy drive and CD drive for target practice at a shooting range for far less than the privelege of having someone sell me a processor / memory / NIC / monitor combo. And that counts range time.

    Is there some aspect to this that I just don't get? What justifies the cost of these things? Getting hundreds of computers custom built, these days, is no big deal -- and you don't have to specify any naughty security / administrative hassles you don't want, right?

    Corrections appreciated,

    timothy
  • Wrong, the reason for NCs is the cost - not the (purchase) price. It is all to do with Total Cost of Ownership over the lifetime of the unit. PCs in corporate environments, even used as glorified NCs still cost too much. That's without taking into account their power consumption etc.

  • Read the GPL section 3 sub a. You may as well read the rest of section 3, too. They can do this.

  • Posted by fR0993R-on-Atari-5200:

    For once Slackware is put into the lime-light it deserves. It is IMNSHO the most effic^H^H^H^H^H compact distro out so far.

    I made my own "thin client" w/ Slacky: a 486/33 with a 204MB HD. I had Slack 4.0, complete Netscape, and all tcp/ip utils running with 50MB of room for userspace and a 10MB swap. Gets ~1Mb/s thru-put off of the wcarchive through our cable modem network. Not bad for obsolete hardware!
  • At no point does the message say you are *required* to buy the product to get the source.

  • ...with 50MB of room for userspace...

    ...Gets ~1Mb/s thru-put off of the wcarchive...

    Which would be fun... for about 50 seconds. 8^)

  • That's the same with an OS, and isn't linux specific.

    So it takes you back to the old, "wich is more explotable; M$ or Linux" argument.

  • The USB hardware spec is FIRM. So they can buld that into the box. Only the software needs work, and after they get it going, because the OS is flashable, they can update it.

    End of Story.
  • Although your argument is flawlessly correct, the point is that it's a bad idea. Java NCs are just as bad (arguably worse) than these WYSE terminals. Either way you're going to have terminals sitting around with outdated flashware. The fact that it would be the same with JVM doesn't make the Linux solution any better.
  • I don't know how Wyse does it, but the Netwinder boots directly from a 1M flash chip, mapped as ROM rather than as a disk drive. The flash contains a small (~64k) boot loader + debugger and a compressed Linux kernel, and can also contain a compressed initrd image (handy for some 'rescue' situations where you've trashed your hard drive; with 1M flash there's only room for a couple of utilities).
  • The one thing that concerns me about embedded linux boxes like this is what happens when 3 months down the road someone finds a DoS for the kernel thats installed on these boxes. Even if its flashable, chances are there will be more boxes left un-upgraded than there will be maintainted boxes. I hope this doesnt turn a feature (open source) of linux into a fault.
  • It's a Cyrix Media GX (up to a 200Mhz in their 5355). Granted, it is a bit expensive, but at least it isn't an NCD overpriced WinCE toy.

    Anything is better than WindowsCE for thin-client workstations. If it runs linux, all the better. The largest problem of course: Citrix 3.x ICA client (no seemless windows) and no RDP support. It's a better X than NCD's cludge.

    The client can be started from memory (flash), but at least the last time I talked with a Wyse rep, it does require a memory upgrade of the box to 16M of RAM. The other cost is the PCMCIA "root" filesystem - those memory cards aren't cheap.

    Same thing goes for Netier. They use up to a 300Mhz Cyrix MediaGX machine as well - with harddrive/floppy/pci and other neat goodies as options. It shouldn't be hard to get one of them to run Linux either. Imagine a beowulf cluster made out of those tiny little things.

    Still waiting for other neat ports (like StrongARM to the HP Joranada 820), or ANY other *normal* WindowsCE platform that would fight for market share. What would you rather be running on your palmtop? :)

  • Same situation, really.

  • Maybe, maybe it will work.

    First of all I don't know anything about games, I don't play them. But that doesn't mean you can't run a big game on a thin client.

    You run the game on the server you connect to, not the thin client. The client only runs X. And OpenGL might be in XFree86 4.0, so if they wait for that, and used it, it would probably really rock.

    My work on thin clients has shown me that there are even some preformance gains IF you configure your thin client right. The thin client's CPU and RAM only runs X, and you want a rocking video card (From my experiance doing molecular modeling and such). But, your bottle neck is bandwidth, not video or ram. All the background calculations to tell the video unit what to render are done on the server, if the server is fast, that will be fast. If the thin client has a good video subsystem, it will render the graphics fast. Since the thin client has it's own CPU, and if the video unit is fast, it has the potential to blow away a "complete system" because one box does video, and one does the application, and your not bogging down any one system by doing both on it.

    The problems are, 1) you piss off other users that are on that server. 2) you frequently find the bottleneck is the data transfer rate between the server and the thin client (espically on 10baseT or less) 3) Most thin clients just don't have really rocking video subsystems.

    Now, at home, I have a Linux box that I call a "server" in a generic sence, that is basically my workstation. I also have a lesser linux box (good video, good monitor, 32M RAM, MilleniumII vid card), that I run just as a thin client off the server. I have found that some applications (particularly that use a lot of CPU time for the application, AND a lot of CPU time for X) are much faster on the thin client.

    Best thing to do, is just build your own. Pick up an P60 through P200, slap in a good video card and 8 to 32M ram, and just hang that puppy of a super fast server, and you'll be much happier, and probably pay less, than buying anyones "Thin Client."

  • When someone says Flash memory that means a ROM that can be changed. So when a new kernel comes out or a patch is relased they just have all the clients load the new patch. It's not anymore difficult that having a bunch of fat clients doing it off an NFS.

  • Well probably not...but maybe they saw some of the notes scribbled in my notebooks. I've been working on a design for *nix based NC's for a few months. My idea is alot similar to theirs (booting from a flash ROM, more than a dumb terminal less than a PC). But I see a problem here, it's too damned expencive. I didn't see a white paper on this thing but they sure charge you up the ass for it. I could build my own box and only pay about 4-500$ each. I'm gonna keep working on my design because I have always enjoyed setting up slim/thin clients for people. I like central administration better than taking care of tons of PC's in an office.


    For those of you who keep talking about fat clients with hard drives and floppies and such, remember that they are very expencive, in the short run they are cheaper, but in order to stay current and competitive with the rest of the business world you need to upgrade about every 20 months or so. If I have a thin client that will last me for 5-9 years (thats 500$ or 600 if you're bying a WYSE thin client and only once every 5-9 years excluding server upgrades which should be done every 3 years or so to keep up the speed) as opposed to 600$ every 20 months for PC's which muct be administered all the time (can we say overtime?) you start to see the TCO savings. With a thin client I need to upgrade the software on the server (probably Appliware or Star Office if it's a corporate office) which takes me a fraction of the time it takes me to upgrade dozens of PC's.

  • "Heat driven" means no moving parts (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It probably relies on phase change.

    When they first started putting pentiums into laptops, my office got one. Being an electronics tech, I naturally went crazy and took the damn thing apart. It was liquid cooled! The little pipes coming off the CPU led to a heat exchanger under the keyboard.

    I imagine some laptops still use this technology.
  • I was wondering...

    This machines are more expensive than PCs. $839-600... umm.

    Okay, that's the initial price; the real savings come because you update those terminals every 9 years instead of every 9 months (as you would do with PCs). And, since you have everything centralized in a server, it's really easier to keep the software updated and properly set up.

    But I still think that's very expensive.

    If I buy PCs and set them up to behave just the same way the NCs and terminals do, is there anything the terminals will do that the PCs won't? Can't I still use the same client-server design, having the PCs act just like terminals? A PC is cheaper than this terminals but can do more things... is there anything that keeps me from setting it up to do all the things the terminals (NCs) do and more?

    I know, it would be a pain to do with Windows, but I can't see any problems with this centralized design using PCs with Linux (or a BSD) and XWindows instead of NCs. If I find it really useful to keep the applications centralized in a powerful server, what keeps me from doing just that and using PCs as terminals?

    So, in the end, PCs can do all the things NCs do, plus a lot more... and are (in this case) cheaper.

    Alejo.

  • That's what I was implying.

  • Posted by fR0993R-on-Atari-5200:

    I meant MB as in MegaBytes and Mb/s as in Megabits
    per second. I believe I was correct with my
    capitalizations, perhaps not.

    So, really, it'd be 50MB * 8Mb/1MB / 1Mb/sec = 400 seconds or about 6 and a half minutes of
    downloading. Not too much...

    ...but on the other hand...

    it's a 486 that would be pretty slow at doing anything
    powerfull to require 20MB of HD space for bins
    and data, let alone 50.

    Laters

    fR0993R

    ..Linux needs 1/2Life...

  • Oh well, perhaps I just miss the old days curled up in the green glow of a WYSE term hacking useless C progs for shits and giggles. Those where the days!

    Ooh yes. Though I'm sure I remember them being amber. I also remember them having the nicest keyboards I've ever used.

  • Well, this looks like a really good system, because from the looks of this article, it looks like it is possible to play quake over this network, so I'm all in favour of it :) No 3dfx, but you can't have everything.

    I know I always make every article relevant to quake, but in the big picture, thats what really matters.

  • USB? (Score:1)

    by gavinhall ( 33 )
    Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    "...the diminutive box is packed with ports, including Universal Serial Bus..."

    I didn't think Linux USB was ready for prime time. Is WYSE jumping the gun with this announcement (i.e. vaporware) or have they made source mods that haven't been contributed back?

    And speaking of which, is anyone checking up on these "embedded Linux" companies to make sure they are making the source available?
    --
    "Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
  • Why don't you do it if you want to play self-appointed security person?
  • Finally, someone making a linux based product NOT based on Redhat. PEASANTS REJOICE!
  • Thanks for pointing to the "printer-friendly" form of this article, instead of the gaudy ad-crammed regular version. I find the cleaner text much easier to read. I'd love it if more Slashdot posters followed suit and pointed to printer friendly versions of articles where available.

    --JT
  • or so the article led me to believe. No harddrive, no floppy, few movable parts to wear out. Possibly the ideal terminal.

    Time will tell... time will tell...
  • At $600 in bulk, this things don't sound like a bargain. As much as I dislike the sub-$1000 PC market, it is there. Why would a company choose these machines over more versatile and powerful solutions like E-Machines, which run for about $800 w/monitor at 350 MHz?
  • Well first of all 5 months is a little bit of an exaggeration. If you're replacing your machine every five months it's either (a) because you have money to burn or (b) because your work requires cutting edge technology, which most work does not.

    And the only reason that regular PCs do have higher replacement rates than NCs is that they use local resources rather than remote ones, however there's no reason that a PC can't be used as an extra-functional NC.
  • The computer uses a heat-driven water cooling system instead of a fan to cool...

    Yum.. (I really have nothing more to say)

  • Anyone notice that they are booting off of a flash memory module? Is this hardware available to the Joe Public? I'd like to stick my kernel and a few tools onto an 8mb flash module for quick bootups as well?

    I think you would need a flash module with an IDE or SCSI interface, so it just looked like another disc drive to the rest of the system. Anyone know someone who sells something like this?
  • ...will cost less than $600 in high volumes, McNaught said,
    emphasizing that the real cost savings come with lower installation and management costs.

    As it says, it's not the initial cost that's important. It's the cost savings, over the useable life of the terminal..

    ...terminals that are inexpensive to buy, install, and maintain; that are centrally controlled; that have a life span of five to eight years...

    ...and how many of those E-Machines would you expect to last 5 years?

    I'm not saying I agree/disagree (with the article or you). I just think you're taking the article out of context. You're trying to compare apples to oranges.

  • Jeez, if something happened and the cooling system broke... man, that would suck. Although, admittedly, it's a better long term solution (ideally) than a fan.

  • What? (Score:1)

    by gavinhall ( 33 )
    Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    "Why don't you do it if you want to play self-appointed security person?"

    What on earth are you talking about? I'm not playing self-appointed anything, I'm asking a question.


    --
    "Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
  • I'll agree with you on the maintainance part - this machine looks pretty unlikely to break due to overuse.
  • Slackware is great. Highly customisable and rock solid!
    Skip
    --------------------
    flifson@csdotuctdotacdotza
  • Posted by stodge:

    You can compare apples and oranges - they're both fruit, but one's green, and one's erm orange (its a joke!)

    I do think the price is a bit high for a thin client, when you can buy a full PC for the same price.
  • Yes, they are a bit steep.

    However, they do have nice things built in like a pc card reader.

    They so much easier to manage than PC's, especially winblows PCs

    They support a lot of protocols as well.

    They probably use 1/100th the power of a normal ATX PC. The savings in costs here alone is justification for some people.
  • I just read an article in the June 14th Network World about the new Wyse terminal, and not once do they mention Linux. Sorry, I don't have a web link.

    99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
    fix one bug, compile it again...
  • All distrib wars aside, I must say this is a big plus for Linux. I work in a shop that has tons of users running WP and terminal access programs on PII's with 128megs of RAM. It's nuts. Give me back the days when a user had a dumb term and all I had to worry about was whether or not it was plugged into the network or not! (Or just plugged in in the case of some users.) If your buying a PC to act as a dumb term, sooner than later someone gets the brilliant idea that they are more than dumb terms and start adding 'functionality' to get 'more bang out of their buck'. You start that and the next thing you know someone's complaining that they are too slow to do something you never ment them to do. (Duh!) So now you're upgrading. (To stay 'current'.) $800 for a PC is _not_ cheaper than a $600 term, not if you try to replace the PC every 3-4 years. Add that to service... on my home PC, I like to fix/upgrade things myself if/when they break, but at work, I've got better things to do than play Dr. with some useless NT box. (That's what vendors are for. :) If it's broke, swap the unit. End of story.

    I'm ranting. The point is there is a place for thin clients, we just have to drop this whole "more is more" mentality on the grounds that it's too simple. We're missing something here.

    Oh well, perhaps I just miss the old days curled up in the green glow of a WYSE term hacking useless C progs for shits and giggles. Those where the days!
  • Well admittedly, none of the other popular distributions are exacly prone to crashing. And it's just as easy to customize them. The difference is that most of them come with their own little "preconfigurations", whereas slackware allows you the opportunity to do it yourself.
  • Where did they arrive at that price point? The main point of thin clients is price. You can buy a full PC for that price.

    I've been looking into building my own linux-based thin clients for distributed processing purposes. I priced all the needed parts for a very hefty machine at less than $300. Maybe they aren't going the x86 route?



  • I used to work for a company that used a water cooled IBM mainframe. The coolant pumps were in the basement and the mf was on the ground floor. As you've probably guessed, one day one of the coolant pipes burst. 8] To make matters worse, it was on the output side of the pump and the low pressure cutoff failed. The pump emptied ALL the water into the basement in about 90 seconds. The final straw came when it was discovered that all the toner for city bus sized laser printer was stored directly on the basement floor next to the pump. "bad things, man!"
  • > For those of you who keep talking about fat
    > clients with hard drives and floppies
    > and such, remember that they are very expencive, > in the short run they are
    > cheaper, but in order to stay current and
    > competitive with the rest of the business
    > world you need to upgrade about every 20
    > months or so.

    Why do I need to upgrade a pc-based X-Terminal?

    I am running a HP-Vecta 386sx16 with 8MB RAM and a 100MB Harddisk, build nearly ten years ago, for five years as a X-Terminal with X and linux. It wasn`t always blindingly fast, but good enough for running (displaying?) KDE, Netscape and StarOffice lately.

    I really can`t see why I should upgrade the old Vectra, it good enough. And I wont change anything about it until it crumbles to dust. Ok, I might add, that I put up another X-Terminal some weeks ago, a 486dx4-160/32MB-RAM/300MB-Harddrive, but its much more intelligent and even somewhat independent from the server.
  • Will they come with the "live, streaming slack" logo plastered on the front?

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