November 5th, Somewhere.

Today exactly six months ago, a new project was founded at SourceForge:
Thinstation.

Thinstation didn't start from scratch, but as a fork from Netstation (netstation.sourceforge.net). For a while Miles Roper had a parallel development to the main branch of Netstation, the so-called "Netstation Variant Series". For various reasons, it seemed necessary to split the development of the variant series, from the main branch. One key reason was the wish of Miles to stay with glibc, which is crucial for supporting the ICA client and other non-GPL programs. Glibc is however "fatter" than some alternatives.

During April 2003 it became clear something had to be done soon. Miles didn't want to continue on his own with a public project, but two variant users and beta testers, Paolo and Mike, offered to help with a new project. Paolo would do the home page and web work, Mike offered to collect material for a FAQ. As it is perfectly clear, this was mostly moral support, but it worked!

And so Thinstation was born.

About ten days later came the first Thinstation, ver. 0.91. Of course this was mainly a bug fixed "variant series". Four weeks later came ver. 0.92 and the very next day the beta program for ver. 1.0 started! 1.0 went gold August 11th 2003. It was a major clean up of the code and bug fixes as well as new features. At this time we felt Thinstation was solid and reliable. As any piece of software it is not perfect and new bugs are discovered. Ver. 1.0.1 was release September 26th and 1.0.2 today, November 5th.

While the 1.x series is being perfected, a new exciting thing is going on in the background: ver. 2.0! Ver. 2.0 is a *complete* rewrite and is in reallity a new Linux distribution with its own compiler and libraries!

Today Thinstation 2.0 got upgraded from alpha status to beta status. It will take the discussion too far here to mention all the great new things, but here are a few juicy details:

• new self contained development environment
• new 2.4.22 Linux kernel
• graphical boot splash screen
• quieter messages on bootup (less verbose)
• new run level support
• new file system: squash fs (better compression)
• enhanced and rewritten nsp support
• enhanced fault management, can email errors logs from syslogs
• remote web management, with embedded telnet/vnc java client
• support for local/floppy/usb-key/samba/nfs storage of thinstation*.conf files
• new optional run-time menu system to let the user choose his preferred
  settings
• native Linux bootable cd-rom (no more floppy compatibility mode)
• new RDP client (rdesktop 1.3) supporting 24 bit colors connection with
  MS Windows 2003 Server (and 16 bit colors in single-user Win XP mode)
• a simple client side web browser (Dillo)
• updated tarantella package
• ICA manager support
• automatic audio cd playback upon insert
• enhanced debug package, with an integrated editor

There is still a lot of work to be done before 2.0 goes gold, but if you see how far Thinstation came the last six months, where will it be in another six months!?

We welcome more developers - if *you* work with Thinstation, join the mailing list (thinstation-developer@lists.sourceforge.net) and let us help each other!

Miles, Paolo & Mike.