There are about 1000 million PCs on the planet, most running that other OS. For the folks running free software, the future is now. They can run on almost anything. They can shift hardware/software platforms easily. They can increase the number of seats easily. The 900+ million not running free software are now or will soon be a burden to their owners: mal-ware, forced upgrades, high life-cycle costs and bloat.
This book is a gem. The author has written a compact volume covering many facets of GNU/Linux on thin clients. The book is persuasive and gives attention to issues of users and managers. The author is the same David Richards who led the government of Largo, Florida, to adopt GNU/Linux on thin clients under the radar of Microsoft, through the valley of thin clients, across the mountains of IT to the promised land of GNU/Linux--before Munich and Extremadura. This is also the same person who brought thin clients on e-bay.
You walk into the room. It’s cool and quiet. You see thirty new workstations giving great service. Your cost of hardware was CAD$350 for each workstation, CAD$10 to connect it to an existing 100Mbps LAN, and about CAD$60 for a share of a server in another room (CAD$1 = US$0.87). Your software costs were only some download and CD burn time and forty minutes for installation. Your operating costs are virtually nil. The server runs for months without a reboot. The workstations have nothing but network boot loaders. You back up only one machine, the server.
