I’ve been researching options for thin clients over the past few months and trying to get my Fit PCs to boot over LTSP / etherboot (still no joy so far). I do have them working as thin clients via XDMCP thought. Along the way I have found some handy websites which I thought I would make a note of here:

VM from GDM – This one explains how to set up a custom session type so that it logs you directly into a virtual machine instance from the Gnome Display Manager. So you get a full screened windows or whatever session with no Gnome running in the background.

Thin Client Howto – This one is a slightly out of date but still useful run through on how to get clients booting via etherboot.

disklessworkstations.com – This is a commercial vendor of tin client workstations, some of which support dual screen which is useful for GIS workers and software developers. I havent purchased any of their products & would love to hear from those who have.

Ubuntu LTSP quick install guide – contains a useful hint when setting up a 64bit server with 32 bit clients (sudo ltsp-build-client –arch i386 )

This guide has a few handy nuggets like reminding you that every time you update the server you should rerun

ltsp-update-kernels
ltsp-update-image
ltsp-update-sshkeys

One other thing to note is that I believe LTSP is now bundled with the Ubuntu alternate CD so I’m thinking I might do a complete system re-install when 9.10 comes out.

I really want to get this LTSP stuff working nicely – I think its an enviromentally responsible way to go (my FIT-PC’s only consume around 7 Watts of electricity) and makes a lot of sense in terms of configuring and securing one server and all your clients automatically benifiting from a single admin action.