[CDBUG-talk] An idea of mine.

[Jonathan Franks]

Hi all,

Well the conversation has been a bit slow up to this point but I suppose 
new lists are like that. Anyhow, I've been mulling over an idea lately 
and I figured I'd throw it out to you folks to see what you think.

Firstly, my laptop seems to get extraordinary battery life under FreeBSD 
as compared to Windows. This is what started the thought process.

You see, I have 54 Dell Lattitudes split between two elementary schools 
in the district. They are used heavily, and we have constant battery 
life issues. Essentially, the schedule just doesn't give them much of a 
break during the day. We could certainly buy more batteries and double 
up, but they're expensive.

So I was sitting in the library the other day working on my laptop, when 
I realized that I'd been using it for about four and a half hours and it 
was still going. I'd been using rdesktop to do some administrative work 
in Active Directory. Then I glanced over at the thin clients.....

So here it is. Do you think that I could significantly extend the 
battery life on the Lattitudes if I were to load them with a small 
FreeBSD load, and use rdesktop to basically turn them in to mobile thin 
clients? In order for it to work, it would need to be as transparent as 
possible. In other words, I'd need to set them to automatically connect 
to the terminal server on power up, and devise a way to ensure that 
third graders could easily shut them down cleanly every time. (Perhaps 
mapping this to the power button?) . 

So am I crazy?

-Jonathan