Thin terminals for FreeBSD

[Nagy László]

  Hello,

I need to setup an environment where some users (10 to 20 employees) 
will use terminals to run programs. They need to run a few popular 
programs: thunderbird, firefox, adobe acrobat, openoffice and gaim. This 
site will be a customer service. We decided to reduce the costs by using 
Open Source software and cheap terminal computers. This is a good 
solution because most of the users will read messages and images on the 
screen and they can share the same processor and memory easily. I know 
that I can setup cheap computers and use its X server as a terminal for 
another central computer. This solution still requires new (or used) 
computers. I would like to reduce the costs to the minimum. Here are 
some key questions that I could not answer:

- Is there a more cost-effective solution? (Something that I did not 
think of)
- How much RAM will I need? Will FireFox Thunderbird and OpenOffice load 
shared objects and reduce the overall memory usage? Or should I reserve 
256MB of memory for each client?
- Do I need to use gigabit ethernet? Or is it enough to use a normal 100 
Mbps wired network? I heard that there can be bandwidth problems when 
using many terminals, but I do not have experience.
- Are there any pitfalls that I need to be aware of?

 It would be perfect to provide links to some articles or manuals - I do 
not need anyone to write detailed instuctions and do my job. I'm asking 
for help because the handbook was not very useful in this case. I only 
found this:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/term.html#TERM-X

It does not help too much, and there is no know-how. I really need to 
know what hardware I need to buy.


Thank you

   Laszlo