Help with Lo Fat client at home

KAGY

Hil all,
Moved my main pc to the living room as a HTPC but I'm missing it from the office :-(

I have an old PC, can't remember the exact specs, 32bit amd chip from about 6 years ago, which I was thinking would be a thin / lowfat client in the office. I've done a bit of googling but seem to be going around in circles and I'm starting to think that there might be a simpler way of doing it. The old pc would be good a lot of the lower end applications
What I need is mostly office type applications, some running through wine or on a VM. And some graphic editing, media playing etc. All files will be stored on the HTPC

Am I trying something too complicated with this thin client thing, have you done something similar.
Anyone got hints on how to start this up, or other suggestions (I'm not looking for a walk though, I'll put in the hours once I'm pointed in the right direction )

Thanks,

Karl
PS other info
CAT 5 lan, htpc running Kubuntu 9.4, old pc running xubuntu 7.10 but don't mind clean installing anything on this.
HTPC AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 1GB ram

Khannie

So the HTPC has some decent processing power, right? Cos VM's in particular can be very slow on old hardware.

Anyway, I'd suggest you look at NX ( www.nomachine.com ). It allows you to basically remote desktop to another unix / linux box. I use it all the time over a DSL connection to my work machine (so I don't have to set up a development environment at home etc.).

KAGY

Thanks Khannie, that seems to be what I'm looking for, I had thought of going down the VLC route, but threw that out because someone might be watching TV on the htpc at the same time.

Unfortunately, when I blew the dust of the old machine the video card kept crashing the machine (I had to put an oooolld 8MB card it, so I'm only running at 1024). If I have to fork out €50 for a new card I might as well add an extra couple of bob and upgrade (there seems to be electrolyte (brown crystaline stuff) leaking from the top of some of the caps around the processor too so the mobo is probably on the way out)

That reduces my problem simply to one of network storage but thanks for the help anyway, I'll probably play around with NX for the opposite reason to you (to access my HTPC from work!)

or maybe I'll go and get one of these, can't get any thiner:

Khannie

KAGY wrote: »

I'll probably play around with NX for the opposite reason to you (to access my HTPC from work!)

Oh I do this too.

Having the ability to ssh to home (nx uses ssh) is useful for a variety of things.....proxying and encrypting web traffic for example. Me? Browsing? In work? NO SIR!