What's Thinstation?
Thinstation is a thin client Linux distribution that makes a
PC a full-featured thin client supporting all major connectivity
protocols: Citrix ICA, NoMachine NX, MS Windows terminal
services (RDP), Tarantella, X, telnet, tn5250, VMS term and SSH.
No special configuration of the application servers is needed to use Thinstation!
Thinstation can be booted from network (e.g. diskless) using Etherboot/PXE
or from a local floppy/CD/HD/flash-disk. The thin client configuration can be centralized to simplify management.
Thinstation supports client-side storage (floppy/HD/CD/USB) and printers (LPT/USB). Prebuilt images and a Live CD are available too!
Mozilla Firefox and lighter browsers are supported as client-side browsers.
Latest stable release is version 2.1.3
News
2-Nov-2005 Oops! We have had a slight emergency with the wiki, which took these pages out. This is an emergency page and a lot of links are dead and out of date. We know and we're working on it!
22-Oct-2005 A little more than one year ago, we had a poll about how many Thinstations you guys were operating at that time. Wouldn't it be fun to see where we are today?! Vote before November 7th.
16-Oct-2005 What to do when your boss at the library gets sick of the always broken public MS Windows terminals and ask you to replace them with "something better" - for no money, no new hardware, no new management resources - and within two months... Cameron Miller faced this recently, and here is the tale...(hint: Thinstation was useful :-)
16-Oct-2005 The Slovenian TS-O-Matic site is currently unavailable due to domain registration troubles. The other TS-O-Matic sites are running as usual, but we could need a few more, especially in Asia and the US. Drop us a mail if you are interested and have band width to burn (2-500 MB/day). Update 19-Oct-2005 The Slovenian site is back in business.
16-Sep-2005 Thinstation version 2.1.3 has been released This is a bugfix release. Changelog. Ver. 2.1.2 had a bug in the mouse detection and was quickly replaced by ver. 2.1.3 fixing this problem along with a minor mistake in an ICA file.
28-Jul-2005 The LiveCD of 2.1.1 finally appeared! Paolo made a priority of this before his holiday and put this one and the prebuilt netboot version on the server for download. Great way to try out what Thinstation is about!
18-Jul-2005 Cameron Miller has kindly contributed Xpdf ver. 3.0.0 for Thinstation 2.x (it has been tested succesfully with 2.1.1 and 2.2beta3). The package is compiled with print support, so you can print pdf files directly from Thinstation. You probably want the extra fonts package too. Both are available from the download page.
26-Jun-2005 Thinstation version 2.1 is here! Today Sunday June 26th the Thinstation project is proud to announce that ver. 2.1 is released and is ready to download from the download page. Expect the TS-O-Matic servers to hold it within a few days too. Among the goodies: IceWM window manager, xtdesk desktop icons, PCMCIA support, wireless network, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, integration with ICA ver. 9 client, NX client, rdesktop ver. 1.4.1 with native disk, sound, port redirection and a lot of bugs fixed. (EDIT: A missing file has bumbed the version to 2.1.1)
12-Jun-2005 New poll! This time we are curious to see which is the most typical screen resolution for your Thinstation clients. Please vote. The poll ends June 26th 2005.
1-Jun-2005 Mike has contributed wget ver. 1.9.1 for Thinstation 2.1. Apparently he needed it himself? :-) Read on.
29-May-2005 For those not too happy with the default XP theme for iceWM in the Thinstation 2.1 series, Mike has added the Blue Crux theme as an alternative (see http://linuxin.dk/pictures/thinstation1.jpg for a sample). Get it here
15-May-2005: Someone out there likes us. I accidentally stumbled on this comment in an article on TechRepublic:"The end users love them (that's Thinstation) because there is no lock ups or reboots ever. The front office guys love them because it will potentially save them $27,000 a year for new PC's every 3 years. Help Desk loves them even more. Any user can log into any station and require no additional setup for mail, or web. All the printers are available for their choosing and all their icons are in their very familiar places. Remote control of Terminal Services is much faster and reliable, so correcting any problems never requires a drive across town. Deployment is FAST! We build our own client machines for less than $200 and in 20 minutes you have a system loaded and ready with all the software required. There is even more praise, but I feel already embarressed... Read on yourself here.
18-Mar-2005: New Docs: Darren Martz has written an updated HOWTO: Boot Thinstation from an Compact Flash card - a second opinion. Trevor Batley has contributed a kernel compilation HOWTO