Thursday, November 01, 2007

Local Apps on Edubuntu Thin Clients

Dave Trask is having an orgasm:

Hey everyone! History has been made at UDS Boston! Last night, Halloween, four developers holed up in a room in the Hotel@MIT and hacked away on what would become a working version of local apps running on an Edubuntu thin-client! This is VERY big news. Normally in a thin-client environment, the applications all run on the server. This is fine except when you have a whole lab of kids using Firefox and Flash to access an educational web site or to (*gasp*) play games. What about YouTube? Well, with local apps you take advantage of some of the processing power on the thin-client itself (which largely goes unused). In essence we simply ask a particular application to run on the thin-client rather than the server. This will be something that can be defined for individual thin-clients or groups of thin-clients. As schools already have or possibly may purchase more powerful thin-clients, the choice to be able to run some applications such as firefox may become more desirable. Right at this moment I am watching a very smooth video running locally in Firefox on a thin-client. Normally it runs quite choppy on a thin-client, but when running locally it’s very smooth just like running it on a desktop or laptop.

This is a big deal in the Linux thin client world.

1 comment:

WirelessBen said...

Great Tom! I can't wait to use it.