Have you already purchased your thin clients ?
are you still planning this ?

If you're a starter and have no clue about thin clients maybe you've to give a look at: http://www.ltsp.org/
Linux Terminal Server Project

Or explain us what you want to achieve

Hope it helps
Ben

Have you already purchased your thin clients ?
are you still planning this ?

If you're a starter and have no clue about thin clients maybe you've to give a look at: http://www.ltsp.org/
Linux Terminal Server Project

Or explain us what you want to achieve

Hope it helps
Ben

You're question is a little vague. Typically, I would be asking you what YOUR requirements are. What will the devices be used for? Are we actually talking actual thin client's in the sense that they have no drives and few local resources, or are you speaking marketting speak and mean thin client the way Citrix uses the term?

You're question is a little vague. Typically, I would be asking you what YOUR requirements are. What will the devices be used for? Are we actually talking actual thin client's in the sense that they have no drives and few local resources, or are you speaking marketting speak and mean thin client the way Citrix uses the term?

Network - Assuming you are not trying to do video on many thin clients, 100 megabits/s to each client should work very well. It helps to have a network switch with a gigabit/s port(s) or a gigabit/s switch feeding other switches. Ancient 10 megabits/s stuff is not usable at modern screen resolutions. Refreshes take too long.

If you boot your thin clients over the network all at once, say by wake-on-lan and use NFS to serve files to them, booting will be slower because of the bottleneck but once up the volume of traffic will be much lower. You should be able to run 24 thin clients from a single gigabit/s connection to a server. With video that number will be much less and refreshes will be noticeably slower. Even with mostly text, one gigabit/s connection will be maxed out with about 50 thin clients. Remember, some motherboards run the NIC on the server on a PCI bus so that may prevent you from adding more than a couple of NICs. Check out the data paths on the server if you don't want to find the NICs a limiting factor.

Server - On good thing about that other OS is that since Vista, the world abounds in powerful PCs able to run 40 or 50 thin clients with ease. You want about 100 megabytes per thin client and about 100 MHz-core per thin client for usual browsing of static pictures and text. You want a number of hard drives in software RAID 1 to increase disc I/O performance. Multiple heads and huge RAM for caching files helps a lot. Large SATA or SCSI drives have pretty high transfer rates and decent seek times. It is useful to have 64bit motherboards for the server. They have much larger bandwidth between CPU/RAM/NICs/Storage. Use SSD is you need even more speed. Don't forget you may need extra cooling if you have more RAM and storage in the box.

EdUbuntu, Debian and other distros have easy ways of configuring a GNU/Linux terminal server either at install time or using package managers. Look for LTSP in the packages. For a simple stand-alone system your server likely needs to run DHCP, TFTP and NFS in adddition to the usual desktop applications.

Network - Assuming you are not trying to do video on many thin clients, 100 megabits/s to each client should work very well. It helps to have a network switch with a gigabit/s port(s) or a gigabit/s switch feeding other switches. Ancient 10 megabits/s stuff is not usable at modern screen resolutions. Refreshes take too long.

If you boot your thin clients over the network all at once, say by wake-on-lan and use NFS to serve files to them, booting will be slower because of the bottleneck but once up the volume of traffic will be much lower. You should be able to run 24 thin clients from a single gigabit/s connection to a server. With video that number will be much less and refreshes will be noticeably slower. Even with mostly text, one gigabit/s connection will be maxed out with about 50 thin clients. Remember, some motherboards run the NIC on the server on a PCI bus so that may prevent you from adding more than a couple of NICs. Check out the data paths on the server if you don't want to find the NICs a limiting factor.

Server - On good thing about that other OS is that since Vista, the world abounds in powerful PCs able to run 40 or 50 thin clients with ease. You want about 100 megabytes per thin client and about 100 MHz-core per thin client for usual browsing of static pictures and text. You want a number of hard drives in software RAID 1 to increase disc I/O performance. Multiple heads and huge RAM for caching files helps a lot. Large SATA or SCSI drives have pretty high transfer rates and decent seek times. It is useful to have 64bit motherboards for the server. They have much larger bandwidth between CPU/RAM/NICs/Storage. Use SSD is you need even more speed. Don't forget you may need extra cooling if you have more RAM and storage in the box.

EdUbuntu, Debian and other distros have easy ways of configuring a GNU/Linux terminal server either at install time or using package managers. Look for LTSP in the packages. For a simple stand-alone system your server likely needs to run DHCP, TFTP and NFS in adddition to the usual desktop applications.