[ale] LTSP

[Joshua Kite]

The Windows laptop that my young boys have been using for the past year is
finally giving up the ghost.  We gave it to them when we thought the hard
drive was going to die, but it's somehow managed to creep along.  I have an
opportunity to buy a very reasonably priced older Dell 650 workstation which
would be more than sufficient for anything they would want to do.  My plan
is to install Ubuntu since they like playing all of the games installed on
my desktop.

I don't currently have a monitor lying around, and I'd rather avoid buying
something else, if at all possible, so I was wondering if I could make the
"new" workstation an LTSP server (probably using Edubuntu) and run the
laptop as a client, possibly as a dual boot in the rare event that they
needed to use something that wouldn't run on Wine.  My research has led to
three questions which are probably obvious, but I may have to make a buy
decision today, and I'm running out of Googlefu.

1) Assuming a decent server and a hardwired network, how well would games
play in such a setup?  Their favorite at the moment is Extreme Tux Racer.
2) Are there any issues in using a laptop as a thin client?
3) If I later wanted to put a monitor and keyboard on the workstation, could
it continue to act as a LTSP server to the client while someone was using it
as a desktop?

If any of you have insight that you think would be useful for a moderately
competent Linux user who has never worked with Terminal Servers, I would
greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,

Josh Kite
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20091223/64d77add/attachment.html