[Voyage-linux] PXE Voyage as replacement for Thin Client?

[Matt Signorello]

Hey Guys,

So I have been researching this for the past few weeks in some spare
time at work and would love to have the opinion of this community as I
would like to base all of my network appliances on Voyage.

Long story short - I just moved to a new house and there are network
jacks in the kitchen, bedroom, basement, etc and I would like to have
a way to provide a full web browser (flash and all) to machines around
the house. Specifically I have found a few small form factor thin
client terminals that support PXE and a traditional think client
implementation that should be more than suitable to do this task and
probably more.

LTSP (Linux terminal server project) looks to be pretty cool and
basically would let me do what I want to do out of the box.. However,
many people have stated the while the solution works.. its quite
lacking in regards to any kind of interactive website compatibility as
well as video / audio playback in general.

I have come up with a new idea: Boot into a complete voyage system
through PXE and then just run X and firefox / whatever on the thin
client with all of the source binaries, scripts, home folders etc
being located on my server. I understand that the main downside would
be that the thin client hardware would take on all of the processing
(thus defeating the main goal of thin client) however I have been able
to use my little 500mhz alix-clone to do basically everything ive
thrown at it. I don't have a VGA port so I don't really know how a
fluxbox WM and firefox / openoffice would perform. Although -- Many
cheap thin clients on ebay (less than $150) seem to have a 1ghz +
processor...

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Some additional notes -- I just don't want to have a tower or mini
machine everywhere for the basic tasks that we use the systems for. I
would like to be as energy conscious as possible and I am the only
main power user anyway..

However my girlfriend and I often would like to check our gmail, look
up recipies etc from the kitchen and bedroom but find the laptops to
be a bit clunky and get in the way if they are on the counter... Only
reason I didn't get netbooks was becase I was able to obtain some
small 10" touch panel displays and wallmounts basically for free but
no other hardware so I need to source some kind of "pc" anyway.. and I
think it would be pretty cool to essentially take any PC / Laptop I
want and have it boot into my pre-defined environment..

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So that is pretty much what I am after - Looking for any comments and
suggestions that can be provided.

Thanks!

Matt