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        Can I convert existing PCs to thin clients?

Section(s): Terminal Servers and Thin Clients, Terminal Servers and Thin Clients
Published on Mar 10, 2005.
Last Modified on Mar 10, 2005.
Last Modified by William Henderson.
Rated 4.3 out of 5 based on 7 votes.

Yes you can. There is no need to have to buy thin client devices, you can simply convert old (or new) PC's to thin clients. The advantage of doing this is that you will significantly reduce management of these PC's. There are several solutions to convert PC's to thin clients:

2X Thin client Server - a commercial solution that deploys a linux based thin client OS to existing PC's and low cost thin clients devices. You can centrally manage settings and configure to which terminal servers (Windows or Linux) a user should log on to.
http://www.2x.com/thinclientserver

PXES - This is an opensource solution that allows you to customize a Linux distribution for your network environment and then serve it out via PXE booting. PXES can boot from: PXE enabled network card, Etherboot, CDROM, Hard Disk & Flash memory. More Info:
http://pxes.sourceforge.net

Etherboot - similar to PXES - http://www.etherboot.org/