[Discuss] X-terminal/thin client that can handle 3D desktop effects

[Alan W. Irwin]

The short story is I am looking for a X-terminal/thin client hardware that
will smoothly display low-end remote 3D apps (such as 3D desktop effects,
low-end 3D games).  The background I give below is a lot longer, but by the
end I have settled on two possible alternatives (HP 5725 thin client versus
EES-5718 micro PC) for the hardware for which I invite your comments.

Most of you should be familiar with the City of Largo Florida story where
years ago the IT department decided to go with a Linux desktop solution for
the city workers consisting of ~600 X-terminals/thin clients displaying
results from Linux desktop software running on one server machine.  This
solution is really easy to administer since all city software is on one
machine, and Dave Richards has written often about the huge cost savings
that result from this approach.

Largo IT is now going to a second generation of the system which runs Linux
desktop software with 3D effects, low-level 3D games, etc.  Dave Richards is
writing a fascinating blog about this remote 3D desktop effort at
http://davelargo.blogspot.com.

He has described their chosen thin-client hardware as follows:

"HP 5725 thin clients. Our price was around $625 each, including upgrade to
1GB memory, 2GB flash drive, optical mouse, PCI expansion slot and ATI video
card."  I July they had delivery of ~600 of these.

That ATI video card is an ATI Radeon 9250, the last card in the r200
series.  Historically, ATI disclosed their r200 specs so there apparently is
a good X.org driver.  (The r300 and r400 series series specs remain secret
which gave ATI a bad reputation in the X community, but last month they
began to turn that around by disclosing specs for r500 and on up.)

The 5725 specs may be found at
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12584_na/12584_na.HTML. A huge
plus is there are no moving parts in the box so the result is no noise in
the office environment and a good chance the hardware will last much longer
than a conventional PC. Another huge plus is the low power consumption.  Our
current PC (300 watt PS) is probably using something like an average 200
watts.  We rarely turn it off so that costs something like $100/year for the
power.  Most of that running cost is saved with an X-terminal so they will
more than pay for themselves over their expected life time of roughly 10
years.

>From the remote 2D desktop perspective 1 GHz cpu speed and 1 GB of memory is
gross overkill.  For example, Barbara and I ran a pentium-133/64MB/100Mbit
X-terminal for a number of years where the 2D desktop speed of the
X-terminal was indistinguishable from the speed of the 2D desktop on its
server.  However, the 3D desktop is a whole different ball game.  For
example, Dave Richards has blogged extensively about the remote 3D Linux
desktop bottlenecks he has found.  (Fortunately, in each case he has managed
to convince the 3D Linux software community to overcome the problem/find
workarounds for him.) Once all those remote 3D issues are sorted out, I
suspect such high-end thin client hardware will no longer be necessary, but
meanwhile high-end hardware is a partial insurance policy against the worst
of the remote 3d display problems for Linux.  (To get a feel for such
problems, ssh to a remote computer and try running glxgears, tuxracer, or
foobillard [or your favorite 3D app] there with display on your local
machine.)

Currently I am running two independent boxes (one Debian sarge and one
Ubuntu dapper), but I look back with fondness to our X-terminal days where
box administration was simpler.  Thus, I plan to go back to the X-terminal
idea for our next hardware upgrade and may simply buy exactly what Dave
bought.  However, I have found what may even be a better alternative with
the EES-5718 which is a fanless micro PC that is loaded with ports
(firewire, CF card slot, 4 USB 2.0, and especially two LANS, with one
100Mbit and the other gigabit).  See
http://www.avalue.com.tw/products/EES-5718.cfm for details.  The EES-5718
integrated Intel graphics should be fine for low-end 3D use such as occurs
for 3D desktop display.  Anyhow, when I was in charge of the VLUG shuttles
(which also have integrated Intel graphics), they smoothly ran foobillard
and tuxracer. I think the gigabit networking might really be a huge plus for
the EES-5718 compared to the HP 5725.  I am not sure whether the reduced cpu
speed (600MHz celeron compared to AMD geode 1GHz) will matter or not since I
think networking first followed by memory size second tend to be the remote
3D bottlenecks rather than the cpu speed of the display device.

Anyhow, if you have some comments on the HP 5725 versus EES-5718 question or
the general hardware and software issues of displaying remote 3D desktops
and/or playing low-end remote 3D games, I would like to hear them.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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