Koolu vs Zonbu (thread renamed)

[mowestusa]

They are supposed to be coming out with a faster version soon.

These thin clients really interest me. I've been wondering though. I have an old DELL 500 Pentium that is running off of an 80watt power supply, there have been no issues with this at all.

I also talked to a guy on the NetBSD mailing list about Thin Clients and which ones are good for trying to load NetBSD onto them. He claimed that he was running an old Pentium 100 or 166 and when he measured the power it used, it was very little compared to a modern computer and perhaps not far from a Thin Client, but the advantage was that it was free, because it was an old computer that someone was getting rid of.

So this leads to my question which I don't know because I don't understand well how electronics and power supplies work. If you have a 400 watt power supply, that does not mean that it is pulling a continuous 400 watts of power? Or does it pull more as you add more load to the power supply like as you spin up more hard drives and an optical drive?

If this is the case, perhaps it would be worth while to simply find and use an old Pentium 166 which would have some standard parts and make it easier to experiment with thin computing, you could probably get them for free.

Of course the other really neat advantage of these new micro pc's or thin clients is their size. An old 166 still would take up some serious space on a shelf or in a closet compared to one of these.

After MadDog's talk at OLF, I sure would like to see more and more "power efficient" computing instead of more and more power usage. I still feel that the big distros like Ubuntu and Fedora and Suse have let us down. Their "easy" to use distros are getting more and more power and memory hungry. Nothing like Vista and XP, but still. I started out using Simply Mepis with KDE on a Pentium 500 with 128megs of ram, and I don't think that I would want to run the new Gnome or KDE on such a machine today.

Fedora has some great GUI configuration tools that I would think would be light weight if you combined them with a Fluxbox that is tricked out. Certainly DSL is addressing this and is amazing, but it would be great to have the package selection available in Fedora and Ubuntu. DSL's preferred hard drive install is a Frugal Install which does not play well with the Debian "apt". Also it is suggested that when using apt with DSL you should use Debian Woody repositories. These are very old, and some of the CLI apts and other lightweight GUI apps are not even available for Debian Woody. Ubuntu's Xbuntu most say is just as heavy as using straight Ubuntu with Gnome. Anyway, my point is that it would be neat to have some more attention pointed in the direction of "small is beautiful".

[spotslayer]

If you have a 400 watt power supply it can supply up to 400w. It will only use what is needed.

D

[davijordan]

I am not an engineer, but that sounds right about the power. I do not have any experience with bsd thin clients yet.... if you want a light server to do linux thin client , zubuntu probably uses the least resources, we are using an old amd duron 800 to push 4 cliens. I prefer k12ltsp becuase it seems more robust. you can almost hook anything to it as a thin client. I do reccomend to have at least a 100m network. unless you are doing text only 10m is too slow. I am still learning about it, sound has been my only challenge wtih it so far, as for clients you can almost use about anything. with etherboot you can even use non-pxe bootable old p1's with 32 meg of memory(64 to 128 is better). I have since moved my low end p1 and p2's to testing firewall/router distros though. as an aside dsl works great on them as a desktop. I have booted diskless with p1/p2/p3, emac/imac/blue g3, and thin clients such as the neoware and compaq t30,s but not t20's yet. to connect to the k12ltsp server. the big thiing to lookl for now is gpce, iscsi, and aoe so can can load any os into a thin client. I see diskless clients and servers with virtual machine and terminal servers in the corporate environment as the standard very soon. Which os you have will be moot except for standalone, specialty, and embedded systems. Sneaker support will be a thing of the past. With most applications becoming web oriented, thee is no need to have a stand alone machine anymore. Eyeos and it's counterparts will become more prevelant. You will be able to boot the os of your choosing and your data anywhere in the world on any system. Laptops as we know them may go the diskless route also. They will be wireless while running cooler and longer. With voice recognion with smaller and smaller embedded computers becoming so prevalent, dick tracey laptop watches will be your next system. Considering how many clunkers I have, i best sell them while i can.

[greggh]

I happened to see a vid recently that relates to this...

Going green: Building a sub-60W PC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJgzd68Tmcc

At 1:53 she starts talking about the power draw of different PSUs. She found that most lower watt PSUs actually drew more power than higher watt rated PSUs. The video was posted by VIA.

The Antec EarthWatts used the least power. Compared to every other PSU tested it beat them all by at least 20 watts.

[davijordan]

i would love to get a hold of one of those power test thiningies. i have an old compaq presario that uses an 85 watt ps if it still works. It would be interesting to see how much power those old machines really use for contrast.

[greggh]

i would love to get a hold of one of those power test thiningies. i have an old compaq presario that uses an 85 watt ps if it still works. It would be interesting to see how much power those old machines really use for contrast.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6882715001

http://www.supermediastore.com/kilwateldet1.html

Edit: It's cheapest at $20.99 here http://www.meritline.com/kilwateldet.html

[davijordan]

Thanx, I ordered one from newegg, since they have a name I am familiar with.