Hi all.
First i'm newbi in linux. I don't know where forum is suitable for me.
I have problem with pc in our school lab. Many of student pc has bad harddsik and our school fund is not allocation for replacement all that.
We have 40 pc with processor Intel Pentium 4 and memory 512MB.
I have checked that all pc can boot from LAN

We have one new pc with i3 processor, 250 GB harddisk, and 8 GB memory.

After hour googling, i just read that pc without harddisk still can used by student called diskless with linux. But the problem is, i can't find any tutorial or article that can guide me to setup a lab school with linux server and client.

I there any one can help me to setup lab computer with linux who can handled 40 clint with all pc condition.

burn a copy of puppy linux and boot from a cdrom. http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%...%20Release.htm if you have no cdroms then lets go another avenue.

Hi! Welcome to Linux Questions.

I think I know what you're looking for. Check this out. (Linux Terminal Server Project)

I remember running a remote "thin Client" as an exercise quite a few years ago. When you powered up the diskless client it used arp/rarp protocol to download a small program from the "host server" which allowed it to run an XTerminal; that is, the display, mouse and keyboard on the diskless system. Any saved data was to a part of the host's disk allocated to that client.

I'm not sure if your i3 system could host 40 clients though but the website above looked like it could offer you some way forward. Notice that some distributions which would be installed on the host already have the software available to run the XTerminal clients. (Your old legacy PCs

Let us know how you get on, it sounds like an interesting and worthwhile project.

Play Bonny!

Two basic ways to run diskless. One is that some small OS be sent to the computers on boot. All the data they need would be in ram. A knoppix (or other OS) disk in main computer could deploy images to all the systems.

Second way is to have a single computer with resources that all clients use. That may be in either partial OS to client and use resources as needed or it may be in a remote desktop configuration where all clients really are using a window on the main system.


There are plenty of ways to do either.

512 mb is not much ram. You need to run a very small distro to run diskless. Have a look at DSL.
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Further to what I mentioned in post #3, using the Linux Terminal Server Project solution the 512 Mb client memory would not be a problem as the clients only run a very small program which is uploaded from the Host server. Just a small memory resident Linux kernel which handles the Display, Keyboard and Mouse... Nothing else, no application handling, no disk I/O, nothing but the Display, Keyboard and Mouse. So your low spec'd clients are not really going to be the problem.

All the applications used by the diskless clients actually run on the host server, in your case the i3 system. Your problem is likely to be 40 instances of whatever applications you're likely to be running (41 if you include the Host system's management of this arrangement.) The whole thing could grind to a halt dependent on the complexity of the applications you're trying to run and the number of clients being used at any one time. (I'd think a word processor has less compute loading than a browser loading and re-loading web pages)

My further

Play Bonny!

Thank's for all help friend's.

I had install edubuntu 12.04 in teacher PC. In first step i just use 15 student PC.
All of that PC can connect to Teacher PC.
I'm trying epoptes.
One class use office writer, the other use calc and inkscape.
In 15 minutes the problem show up. All of student PC run slow and sometimes not respond.
In epoptes all screen on student PC not showing. And i can't monitoring what student do.
To resolve that i had to reset teacher PC and all of student PC.
I don't know what the problem is?

I'm still interest to use linux as operating system in our lab.

The problem will be far too little RAM in the server PC. 8GB is, sadly just not enough. In my experience Open Office is particularly greedy with memory and processor also.