Terminal Services

One of the things I have been thinking about with my new purchase at school is terminal services, but not the terminal services with windows, with ubuntu, I am working on how to get this up and going. I think it would be interesting to see it working and the kids would get a thrill of something different and fun. Now I just need to get some info on what I need and how to get it started. Though I am going to need some more RAM to get it going, off to the technicians office to place an order. Looking at the dell website, we can put 4 gig of ram in the machine, but it says that it will only use 3 gig? I know, we are not using windows, that only handle 3.2Gig of RAM. I love linux.

It looks as though this is going to be a piece of cake.

Straight off the Ubuntu site.

Ok, who is going to download a copy of Ubuntu Server Edition for me?

Also, I think I am going to have to move the box out the back, unless I find a couple of long network cables (which I think I have got) to hook it up to the network switch, this will allow for it to run in all its glory. Else it is just going to be a machine that sits there doing very little. I want this thing to be part of the work next year, not just something that is used for a day or two...

So we are going to have to look at software, open source I think would be best, what could and can we install on it. We have 160Gig of hard drive space to play with, also we need to allow access to RDP on the XP machines to gain access to this amazing resource. It is also going to have to go through the proxy, sorry boys, no games through this box.

Also looking around I found this website http://www.ubuntu.ie which looks at how ubuntu can be used in the classroom, through an Irish education perspective.

Ubuntu Networks Teacher education for sustainable development  www.ubuntu.ie/projects/publications2/TeachZeroDevEd.pdf

Green computing with Ubuntu Terminal Services saves TCO
Ubuntu offers you an easy way to turn a desktop installation into a terminal server for your office or school to serve multiple diskless clients. 

The LTSP-5 Terminal Server implementation that was developed in Ubuntu together with ltsp.org and debian, is now being adopted into most other distributions (Fedora, Gentoo, OpenSuSE). With Ubuntu Terminal Services you get the most recent and reliable Terminal Server implementation currently available on the linux market. 

Recent studies have shown that using diskless Thin Clients in office environments saves on average around 50% of your power costs. Maintenance, user and software management of a Terminal Server is centralised on the server instead of maintaining individual work places. All data is stored on the server, so if client hardware breaks you won't lose data. Hardware replacement is as easy as changing a lightbulb, allowing users to carry on with their work in minutes.

To use Ubuntu Terminal Services during Ubuntu install use the Ubuntu Alternate CD for installation, hit F4 at the bootscreen and select "Install a LTSP server" from the pop up "Modes" menu. If you use a machine with two network cards, your server will work directly out of the box (in the case where you have only one network card it will tell you what to do).