[EdLUG] Clearout: Old ~2006 LT210/M61G thin-client (1GHz Via C3 CPU, 512MByte RAM) going free

[Edinburgh Linux Users Group]

Spec at 
http://www.jet-starinc.com/lt210.html
(The mini-ITX store where I got it from was selling these as a "M61G"
but it still says LT-210 on the box).  This one has 512MByte RAM.  Has
an external PSU.  Only VGA outputs, no DVI.

No drive of any sort internally; I always netbooted it.  LTSP for
whatever versions of Debian were current back then worked great.

Despite being completely fanless, it's still surprisingly noisy... makes
a sort of hissing noise, the volume depending on CPU load.

Project idea at
https://milostrickovic.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/hardware-thin-client-home-server/
(although these days anyone else would have just used a Pi).

I got this back in 2006 and had my wife running an LTSP desktop on it
off of my machine for a while.  Ran out of steam when video in
web-browsers got to be a thing, and Debian's LTSP moved to encrypt all
X11 traffic (the device doesn't really have enough oomph to decrypt
X11-over-SSH) .  Suspect it's well and truly obsoleted by things like
the Rasberry-Pi, but it might be of interest to someone:

(If anyone did want to try LTSP, note existence of LDM_DIRECTX in
lts.conf:  "This is arguably the most important LDM option, as it allows
you to turn off the encrypted X tunnel via SSH, and instead run a less
secure, but much faster unencrypted tunnel. Users who have slower thin
clients will want to set this to True.".  I have a vague recollection
Debian weren't standing for such a hole to be left open and disabled
that option completely but other distros may still allow it).

NB The EdLUG list will nuke the reply-to address; you can reach me at 
  timday at bottlenose.demon.co.uk.

Tim