The HP t5545 looks right for size and price, but I can't tell if it could support displaying arbitrary X apps.

Have a look at Thinstation, it's pretty well designed from the start and that broadens your choice of hw to just about anything really. I have used it on a variety of platforms and compiled roms to load all sorts of things from an rdp client to a browser etc...

jlc

On 6/1/2010 2:34 PM, Jim Davis wrote:

We're looking for what, years ago, I'd describe a s a X terminal -- something small, simple (and ideally cheap) that a user could display X applications on. I guess they're now called thin clients, but they now seem geared as seats on the web, and for this application we would need to be able display the results of running a homebrewed X application from a CentOS system, either through xdm, or ssh with X forwarding, or vnc. Running CentOS too on the thin client would be nice, but not a requirement. The HP t5545 looks right for size and price, but I can't tell if it could support displaying arbitrary X apps.

If you don't care about size or power consumption you should be able to pull the hard drive out of just about any old PC and PXE-boot it with LTSP, giving you an xdm login. A few years ago I would have recommended the k12ltsp el5 distro (centos + ltsp + some other odds and ends already packaged so it comes up working out of the box) but it is sort of dated now - although it still is usable if you want ltsp4 which supports some older devices. Google shows evidence of t5545's working in that environment. More current work is with ltsp5 on fedora or ubuntu.

But, if you are intending this as a 2nd terminal for people who already have a windows or mac box on their desk, you might try freenx on the server, connecting with the NX client from http://www.nomachine.com. It works pretty well running on a 2nd monitor of a windows box, giving the effect of a 2nd machine but with cut/paste working between them.