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thin client?

hi: is there a thin client that

[a] is silent, small, and has sxga VGA output. [b] comes with a reasonable linux distribution in flash drive; (basics only, primarily firefox, thunderbird mozilla and plugins; openoffice; ssh; emacs would be nice.) [c] boots up almost instantly; [d] keeps its distribution reasonably safe from destruction by third-party users; If something goes wrong, a "hit-the-button" mechanism should restore the system. [e] can be easily connected to an ordinary broadband vendor (dhcp), etc. [f] is cheap.

I would like to get something like this for my elderly parents, who are internet novices, and who want minimum fuzz. (no, this is not a thin client for a corporate network!!) I know all the necessary ingredients exist. Has any vendor put this all together?

sincerely,

/iaw

Reply to
ivo welch
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Try the VIA EPIC NLX board.

Mozilla/Openoffice would not be basic at all. Mozilla require 256M Flash Drive and 256M Ram. Openoffice requires 512M Flash Drive. With 512M, we might as well put in KDE/konquer.

Our 512M Compact Flash Drive w/KDE boot up in about a minute.

You can have 2 partitions. Mount the system partition read-only. Mount /var on the second partition read-write. Save and restore /var regularly and on boot.

DHCP upstream/downstream are ready.

Depends on the Flash memory needed.

see

formatting link

Reply to
Linnix

thanks for the suggestion. may I reciprocate?

  • are there not files on /etc/ (like mtab) that are written on? of course, this one, I know. I am more worried about others I do not know. does your distribution take care of such snafus?

  • the via epia NLX with 1Ghz Eden processor seems to cost around 0.

  • given the price of memory, and the fact that the Epia NLX can also play DVDs, I now think that storage should sit on a CD, and a DVD player should be included. (a flash card could be the user storage device.)

the problem is still that we need a vendor to put it all together and support it, so that if stuff goes wrong (software or hardware), I would have someone to ask.

Reply to
ivo welch

/etc/mtab is on ramdisk. Others are either on ramdisk or copied from flash during boot.

It is difficult to rewrite a CD while running off it. So, you are talking about two CD drives. One for booting and one (CD-RW) for saving data.

CD/DVD drives have moving parts. Occasionally, they need to be fixed. We had CD drive that crushed the CD (loading misalignment) and drive/CD that go bad after running for a while (heating up the CD). Some CD drives are louder than hard disks.

If you have an FTP server, you can just download the run-time images with your broadband connection. You can build a working clients with perhaps a

64M or 128M Compact FLash Drive. A 128M CFD ($33) is approxmately same as a CD-RW drive.
Reply to
Linnix

Using CD instead of flash drive, perhaps: Any PC with the "Lindows CD" (now probably called "Linspire").

-Michael

Reply to
Michael Schnell

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