Thin clients come in a variety of packages and sizes. Most consist of a small device to house the thin-client software and a mechanism to boot an OS from ROM or an image housed on a remote server. That device will have audio and video graphics support as well as ports for a keyboard and mouse. Make sure your package includes all the needed peripherals, but remember that adding devices to your thin clients will make them fat and may increase your support needs.
Thin clients comprise three broad categories: X Terminals, Windows-based terminals (WBT) and Sun Rays. X Terminals have the look and feel of the old dumb terminals that served as conduits to midrange and mainframe servers. An X Terminal computer provides an X Window to server-based applications on Linux or Unix. It runs a local X server process and applies local fonts for display. This setup requires more CPU and memory than most thin clients do. In addition, X Terminals need to maintain state with their server-based sessions.
WBTs run Windows OSs--Windows NT, 2000, XP--and support the ICA and RDP protocols. Linux can be used with ICA and RDP to run the latest Windows apps. WBTs boot an OS from ROM or a server-based image and render apps running on servers. Unlike X Terminals, WBTs make use of thin-client software, like Microsoft Terminal Services and/or Citrix clients. Although rendering an app onto a WBT is less burdensome than displaying it in an X Terminal, it still involves client resources that demand computing power and memory.
Sun Ray thin clients are specific to the Solaris OS. Unlike the X Terminal or WBT, the Sun Ray is stateless: Each Sun Ray client contains a firmware module that lets it communicate and receive display commands and data from Sun Ray servers. Sun Rays also support smartcard technology that can be used for authentication to the device and the network. In addition, smartcards can support application and storage. They can be encoded with a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) to power Java Applets as well (see "Sun Ray Architecture," above).
Both X Terminals and WBTs can use low-end or low-cost computers as thin-client devices. PCs and Macintosh computers can each host Citrix, X server software and other thin-client software. Low-end PCs can support Microsoft Terminal Services clients--one way to keep aging computers in service--but they still require the same desktop support associated with fat clients.
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