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Wine Terminal Servers? 25

Posted by Cliff from the technical-issues-may-not-be-the-real-problem dept.
e8johan asks: "I have been thinking about trying to sell a Linux based thin client solution to different markets, like schools. One of the big problems with migrating to Linux is the loss of old applications such as Microsoft Office. Has anyone tried to combine Wine and the LTSP? Does it work? If so, it would enable me (and anyone else) to sell services based on a free (as in libre and beer) server running both open office and their proprietary equivalents in a Windows-like environment, thus reducing the migration costs and making the offer more attractive." While this would be an interesting to tackle, would the licensing terms on some proprietary packages complicate such a system?
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Wine Terminal Servers? More

Wine Terminal Servers?

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  • Ignoring licenses (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JohnFluxx ( 413620 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2003 @10:36AM (#5386246)
    This is a trivial project, if you ignore licenses.

    If you take them into account, then you have yet another legal question to a group computer people.

  • License (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Do you need a license to sell alcohol?

  • crossover has something like this already (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kastor ( 22299 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2003 @10:42AM (#5386285)
    I believe that crossover are selling a server based version of thier enhanced wine that will allow for such access, like citrix and terminal services.

    ->Kastor

  • WOW!!!!!! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Asprin ( 545477 ) <(moc.oohay) (ta) (dlonrasg)> on Wednesday February 26, 2003 @10:44AM (#5386294) Homepage Journal


    DID YOU COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE! [com.com]

    How do you spell 'synchronicity' again?

    • Re:WOW!!!!!! (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm sorry - how the hell is that Offtopic?! It's a link to a cnet article describing a system that does EXACTLY WHAT THE POSTER WANTS TO DO!

      Some of you moderators are just morons!

  • Every time there is an AskSlashdot, someone complains about the questions sucking and that the person should have tried google. But isn't this going a bit far: asking us about something he's doing for profit. I can maybe understand if someone was asking about licensing or something else that applies to the whole community, but I find this question a bit pathetic for the front page of slashdot. I'm really not trying to flame anyone, but I really wonder if AskSlashdot needs a little more direction; perhaps some written guidelines for what should be posted. Just a thought.

    Jeremy

    • A number of points:

      • I'm planning to do it for profit, yes. But nothing stops you from doing the same thing, with the same software, for profit. That is one of the purposes of free (libre) software. Sell the service, not the software.
      • Ask /. may be degrading over the years. But I still read it because once in a while, there is an interesting topic. Stop nagging about it and ask something intelligent your self!
      • Also, this question is (partly) about licensing. The topic occurs in several places here in the replies section. That is one of the beauties of /. Just put your lower comment level high enough, and the place looks like a high quality discussion forum.

  • Try it... (Score:4, Informative)

    by grunthos ( 574421 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2003 @02:14PM (#5388076) Homepage
    I have been thinking about trying to sell a Linux based thin client solution
    Has anyone tried to combine Wine and the LTSP? Does it work?
    <troll>Trying it out would be more useful than just thinking about it.</troll>

    Yes, it works fine. As well as Wine does for any Windows app. I'm running it at home. My kids are impressed at how much faster their 486s run as terminals compared to running a local copy of Windows. They're also disappointed that game support sucks.

    The biggest problem is Wine's varying level of support for the various DLL's required. This is standard Wine FAQ stuff. You can get widely different results based on whether you use Microsoft DLLs or Wine's built-in reimplementations. Licensing would be a big issue using Microsoft's DLLs.

    The second biggest problem is that you're essentially doing streaming video over the LAN, so you can forget about arcade games or anything with high screen update rates. That's a terminal problem, not Wine. TuxTyping has the same problem. (Can anyone recommend a *good* typing tutor that works with LTSP?)

    Standard desktop apps work fine. It bugs me to admit it, but I still find Irfanview under Wine to be a better picture browser that the other X/KDE/Gnome ones I've tried.

    • Re:Try it... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by phoenix_rizzen ( 256998 )
      Depending on your clients (this won't work with 486s or Pentiums) you can use "Local Mode" or even mixed Local/Remote. In this setup, the client downloads the app to RAM, then runs it from there using the local CPU, local RAM, local vid card, local sound card, and so on. Relieves the load from the server, but still allows you to run diskless clients (although we use the local HD for swap space).

      We're using this setup in our elementary school Linux labs. We are running CodeWeaver's version of WINE for the odd Windows app that does not yet have a Linux counterpart. We haven't told them that it's the Windows version running, though, as then they'd want to run other Windows apps and we'd be no better off than before the switch to Linux. :)
    • Try XnView at http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/ . It looks like AcdSee for Windows, but it is available for tons of platforms, Linux included. Oh, and it is free for personal or non profit use, as Irfanview. My only gripe with it is that it seems to consume memory like crazy when in thumbnail mode. But it is as good as it gets.

      /Pedro

  • It sounds like your potential customers want to use Windows. What benefits are they going to get by running Windows applications on Linux? Unless they are going to violate their license agreements, they're not going to be able to share copies of MS software anyway. On the other hand if they're going to pirate them, why not just copy the software illegally to each PC and forget about Linux?

    The point is that Linux has to add value for the customer if it's going to displace Windows on the desktop. It will have to do that by providing superior applications (in the judgement of customers), not by being compatible with Windows.

    • Sorry (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ClosedSource ( 238333 )
      My apologies to e8johan. You asked for advice on how to implement your idea, not for comments on its value. I hate it when people do that to me, so I shouldn't do it myself.

    • Re:Why bother? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by phoenix_rizzen ( 256998 )
      Actually, running this configuration can give plenty of benefits. Yes, you still have to purchase the Windows software, but you don't have to purchase skookum workstations to run them on, nor do you have to purchase expensive MS server software to run a similar setup.

      Buy one skookum server for $3000 or so (dual-proc, mega ram, good disks). Then run thin-clients and diskless workstations. Depending on the speed of the client CPU and the amount of RAM on the client, you can either run pure-remote (run app on server, show display on client) or local-mode (download app to client ram, run on client cpu), and even run a combination of the two on the same client.

      You have super-stable workstations running the normal Windows software. You only have to administer a single software image (the server) and upgrades are simple as there is only a single server image to worry about. All the clients boot remotely across the network, and the local harddrive is used solely for swapspace.

      It's a great concept, and an IT admin's dream -- only 1 box to worry about, full control over everything. All you have to worry about now is dying hardware on the clients. :)

  • Run MS-Office? Probably wrong question. (Score:3, Informative)

    by leonbrooks ( 8043 ) <SentByMSBlast-No ... .brooks.fdns.net> on Wednesday February 26, 2003 @09:13PM (#5391828) Homepage
    The right question would involve working with and exchanging Microsoft Office documents, in which case your answer is OpenOffice.org [openoffice.org], and you can start off by running that under Windows, and continue to run it on machines that remain Waindows for whatever reason.

    In general, you should be replacing apps that are tied to Windows with portable ones (e.g. replace IE with Mozilla) first or in parallel with setting up a thin-client LAN.

    I use both WINE and Win4Lin in LTSP-like situations. Win4Lin is actually running Windows, so of course compatibility is much better, but Win4Lin isn't any good for high-bandwidth (video) or 3D (games) stuff, even not over a LAN. Both WINE and Win4Lin usually run an app noticeably faster that it would natively on the same machine.

    Sound is also very expensive on bandwidth. For these situations, running the app locally is often appropriate. Even a Pentium 133 with 32M of RAM will play Oggs and MP3s without flinching.

    In terms of workstations, network and video card, in that order, are most important, followed by RAM. Run the workstations through a switch, not a hub. If the link switch-server can be gigabit, even better. It's actually hard to buy seriously crappy-spec video cards these days (although SiS are working hard to fill this niche), but if you can get, for example, TNT-2 cards to replace S3Virge cards cheaply, then do it. A good card will give much more satisfying results, even if (as in this example) the driver itself (nv, but you also have the choice of NVidia's binary-only drivers which are much faster and slightly buggier) isn't so hot.

    If you're buying diskless workstations new, then a well-chosen nForce board is good. If you put a hard disk in the workstation, you find that the board is trying to do too much, and you often get glitches and low performance; but if it's only running LAN and video, it seems to get along just fine. It's also hard to buy less than 128MB of memory these days, which makes the option of running multimedia apps locally (shipping only the compressed source data over the LAN) much more attractive.
  • Forgetting license issues for a moment, just boot a thin client that has choices for types of application server you want to go to, be it terminal server, citrix, vnc or X.. ( yes i know.. the serveris local for X.. but you all understand what i mean ).

    And try to move all your users to native OSS solutions.. as terminal server/citrix licenses will kill you.

    http://pxes.sourceforge.net - makes a nice one for pc based hardware.

  • There is a good article here: samag.com [samag.com] [sysadmin magazine] about using a linux thin client, then connecting it to a Windows Terminal Services Server using rdesktop. It may not be exactly what you are looking for, but it's definitely interesting. We've been using rdesktop for about two months (heard about it from this article), and it's great! I'm able to keep my laptop out of Windows more and more!

    Good luck, hope this helps,

    Ben

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