In article ,
 Robert Latest  writes:
> Andrew Gabriel wrote:
>> It's not clear to me if you are still wanting the Pi to be a
>> thin client or not.
>
> Frankly, I don't even know what "thin client" really means -- all I know is
> that the current Windows-based wall-mounted PCs are called thin clients,
> and this colleague of mine and I want to replace them with cheap, reliable
> stuff.

Thin client is a networked display, keyboard and mouse, and
the session you appear to be running on it is really on a
remote system which sees the display, keyboard, and mouse
virtualised. Some thin clients also include audio in/out,
camera, usb ports (and in days past, also serial ports),
which again are all virtualised across a network from the
back-end system which is really running your session.

In general, thin clients are stateless - there's nothing
stored on them (in disk or memory) that is necessary for
your session, so switching them off, or swapping them if
they break won't interrupt your session which will
reappear exactly as you left it when you reconnect from
the same or a different thin client. 'Thin' means the
system is presenting a thin venier with the display,
keyboard, and mouse, but there's nothing else there - the
real system you are using is elsewhere.

In addition to dedicated thin client terminals such as
Sun Ray and Wyse which were used in the past, there is
thin client software such as Citrix, VNC, etc which you
can run on Raspberry Pi (2+ or later), Linux, and even
on Windows.

X Windows is another example of thin client when running
the clients (applications) on a different system than the
X display server. NCD X Terminal servers used in the early
days of X were thin clients, although the term 'thin client'
hadn't been invented back then.

There are a number of different reasons people use thin
clients. In the office I'm currently working, the "desktop"
PC's are all in racks in a data centre 40 miles away with
maintenance teams to keep them working, UPSs, failover to
a different datacentre if something goes wrong, etc. The
desktop thin clients have no data on them and are all
identical, which makes running, maintenance, patching easy,
and if it dies, it's swapped out in minutes and I'm back
up and running again without even being logged out of my real
desktop which has datacentre reliability. I can also access
it identically from home or on the move, using thin client
software on a Raspberry Pi, laptop, or home desktop system.
If the thin client is stolen, there's no data on it (I can't
write to anything on it). Many thin clients are only about
5 watts max too.

> This is big corporation type issue. Windows OS and hardware is leased from
> and maintaned by an external contractor, with extra charges for units
> deployed on the 24/7 shop floor. Huge cost for a few hundred terminals and
> web browsers.
>
>> Modern web browser is too big to run with any performance.
>> Some of the cut-down browsers will perform better, but will not
>> provide a modern experience, will not handle some web sites
>> properly, and will feel old.
>
> "Browser experience" is not an issue. The browser is only needed for
> quasi-static, text-only, purely technical content in an industrial
> production environment. An ncurses-based text-only browser is out due to
> lack of user acceptance and smooth transition from today's GUI (IE)
> solution.

You might look to run a browser in kiosk mode (comes up
automatically as the only application, possibly without any
login depending on your security requirements.)

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

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