On Sat, 12 Jul 2008, Andrew Zbikowski wrote: > The clients have to boot up something. > > Your clients boot off the network using the ROM from the network card. > > The network card downloads a small boot image that is usually the Linux > kernel, and enough utilities to NFS mount an export from the server. > This is most likely what the client images are. > > The XServer starts, and does an XDMCP query to the server. > > The thin client is only the display. Even though the applications are > running on the server and using the server's CPU and memory, the thin > client is still doing the graphics processing. You might want something > a bit faster and a bit more modern than a 386...unless you're doing just > text console. :) The X terminology is a little tricky because the "X server" is running on the machine that one would be tempted to call "the client" -- the usually smaller machine that connects to the larger more powerful machine. So in the X system the thin client has to do a lot of work. Another option is VNC. With VNC the X client and X server both run on the big server machine and the smaller machine just runs a viewer that does very little processing. But, for VNC on Linux, the VNCviewer is an X application which requires that an X server is running on the thin client. It might work a lot better on a minimal client system though, and it has some other advantages over XDMCP. I don't know how low you can go in processing power and make this work. A 386 is so old (I think I started buying 486s in 1993) -- is it not possible to get 486 machines for free that can do this work for you? Even Pentium II machines are getting pretty long in the tooth and I'm sure many are being discarded. Mike