Small, Fast RDP Client?

Tazor asks: "I'm working for a small municipality in Denmark where most of our users are using our Windows terminal servers. Now we want to run a RDP client on our older PCs (133 mhz, 32 mb RAM, 2 gb disks). We figure that the best way to do this, is to use open source, and this is where I need your help. I'm trying to find a small Linux distro, running from either a floppy disk or from hard disk, that boots straight into a RDP client logon screen. It needs to be easy to customize (not much Open Source knowledge in our department) so that we can configure hostnames and set the distro to use Danish keyboard settings. We would also like it to be free. I found PilotLinux, but it runs from a Live-CD and is difficult to customize (for a PFY like me anyways). Hope that hardcore OSS geeks in here can help me."

What we did ...

[Bin]

I work in a school and rolled out a thin client system 4 years ago with a scripted RedHat 6.2 install with a customisation rpm thrown in on 2nd hand P100 - P166 machines with 16Mb ram and a 250Mb HDD.

We used citrix metaframe 1.8, so had the offical citrix ICA client for linux. The client was a little quirky - wouldn't go full screen properly so we had a +20 pixel green border around the edges of the 800x600 screen ... A later release of the client eventually fixed that.

The customisation rpm setup runlevel 4 to be a full screen session logging on to the metaframe servers.

We now have a nfs root system with very little on the harddisks; the kernel (isa network cards and netbooting was just too much work when we could just install grub and copy an updated kernel from the nfsroot when it changed), a few local settings (symlinked from the nfsroot into /localdisk/...) and a local ICA bitmap cache.

Needless to say the thin clients are now being phased out, the thin clients run office type applications very well, but they don't do all the fancy multimedia interactive elearning stuff that all the teaching staff tell me they can no longer teach without.

Bin
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DamnSmallLinux on a USB pendrive

[svanstrom]

Don't forget to support DSL by buying a USB (2.0) pendrive with it already installed:

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/usb.html [damnsmalllinux.org]

Not only will it be useful for projects such as these, but will also help you fix friends computers (quickly check if it's a hardware or software-problem etc); and you can have a lot of "look, I erased Windows and installed Linux for you while you were away"-fun... ;-)

Freedos

[afidel]

Freedos plus the free Citrix DOS client works well for all of my clients where I have implemented it. It takes a bit of work to get the DHCP and TCP/IP working but it's about as lightweight as you are going to get. It's a nice solution because it can turn any machine into a thin terminal, of course due to moving parts it also ends up costing something to maintain vs nothing for real thinterms.