Thin clients em City of Largo, Florida, USA

Por ter visto na mailing list do prt.sc que têm andado a falar sobre thin clients, lembrei-me de um projecto que foi largamente abordado por diversos sites de info sobre FLOSS aqi há uns anitos.

Fiz umas buscas no nosso "amigo" Google e encontrei alguma info sobre esse projecto, o da City of Largo na Florida.

Parece que o projecto continua a ir muito bem, até usam Beryl nos desktops dos users, algo que muita gente acha estranho tendo em conta que são postos de trabalho, ainda para mais usados por utilizadores que não são informáticos.


A pessoa que implementou esta solução tem um blog onde vai descrevendo o que se tem feito:

Dave Richards - City of Largo Work Blog

Deixo aqui alguns links para quem desejar saber mais.

Linux.com :: Secretaries use Linux, taxpayers save millions

Secretaries use Linux, taxpayers save millions
By Robin 'Roblimo' Miller on August 13, 2001 (8:00:00 AM)

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Walk into the Largo, Florida, city hall and look at the two computer screens behind the reception desk. Instead of the typical Windows "Start" button in the lower left-hand corner, they have a KDE "Gear" logo, as do almost all of the 400-plus monitors on Largo employees' desks. Receptionists, administrative assistants, and division fire chiefs here all use Linux instead of Windows, and most of them don't really notice one way or the other. But the elected officials who are responsible for Largo's IT budget certainly know about and notice Linux, because using Linux instead of Windows is saving the city a lot of money.

One of the great anti-Linux screeds we hear is, "The secretaries will never be able to figure it out." If that is so, then Largo employee Judy Judt must be one of the world's smartest office workers. She is sitting at her desk, happily accessing an online city directory that lists all employees, vendors, and other important contacts, using a
simple Rolodex-like program that is running on top of an attractively-themed KDE 2.1.1 desktop. Then Judy moves to WordPerfect to check a document she's been working on -- by unshading an already-opened program window. "I like to keep them shaded like this," she says. "I know it's just habit, that it's really the same as keeping them in, what do you call it, the little bar at the bottom of the screen, but I like to do it this way on my computer."

City saves with Linux, thin clients - TechUpdate - ZDNet

Today, 900 city employees have user accounts on Largo's network of 400 Explora 451 thin clients from Network Computing Devices Inc. On the server side, two Compaq servers--a 933MHz dual-processor ML370 and a 1GHz dual-processor ML350--run Red Hat Linux 7.2 and support about 220 concurrent users.

(...)
For the City of Largo, running a full Linux client on a PC was never an option. "We didn't have PC hardware," he says, and the city wasn't about to make such a hefty investment. The city would have had to purchase about 400 desktop PCs, and then plan to replace those systems about every two to three years, the average PC lifecycle. Replacing one-third of them each year would have cost about $150,000 annually, says Richards.

(...)
Richards first introduced Linux into Largo's IT infrastructure in 2000.
He chose Red Hat Linux 6.2 for its bundled Web servers and Netscape browser. Within a few months, Red Hat introduced the KDE interface with the 2.4 kernel of Linux in version 7.1. With that, the City of Largo was ready to test Linux as a server for thin clients.

Dave Richards - City of Largo Work Blog

Misconception About Server Performance

One of the biggest misconceptions about running software on servers is that it will be slower than having a local personal computer. My experience is that for the most part, the reverse is true when you buy hardware big enough to run your highest concurrent loads. That server will end up being of much higher quality and have better performance than any desktop computer or laptop you will purchase. This is especially true as desktop hardware moves through a normal 3-4 year duty cycle.

Following that line of thought, our 5 year old OpenOffice server is moving into retirement and I'm testing the new one. It's a 4 processor, quad core 2.4Ghz HP rack mounted box with 16GB of memory. Using a stop watch I'm starting the swriter binary and getting cold starts around 2.69 seconds for the UI to fully display. The splash screen only displays for about 1 second. I think the users will be very pleased with this upgrade.