Since we plan to provide both Linux and Windows environments with unified logons and homedirs, we must decide which operating system authenticates users and which one hosts the users home directories. In fact, there are four possibilities:
Authentication and homedirs on Linux
Homedirs on Windows and authentication on Linux
Authentication and homedirs on Windows
Homedirs on Linux and authentication on Windows
The choice between one approach or another depends on your skills on Linux and Windows. Some administrators are very confortable with Linux rather than Windows and vice versa. Also, if you are starting from scratch you may have less constraints than if you are about to migrate an existing solution where you must keep authentication and/or homedirs on the operating system you currently use.
Terminal services are provided respectively by using LTSP (The Linux Terminal Server Project) on Linux and TSE (Terminal Server Edition) on Windows server 2003 (W2K3). You can install LTSP on your favorite Linux distribution but for simplicity, we choose to use K12LTSP which is a Fedora based distribution integrating LTSP. Thus, installing K12LTSP will let you install both Fedora and LTSP.
Client machines can be "true" thin clients designed to be small so that the bulk of the data processing occurs on the server, or diskless workstations used as thin clients. Using diskless workstations is interesting especially if you already have PCs (even old ones) and want to turn them into thin clients. In this case you have to do the following:
Check that the ethernet cards are PXE capable and if not I recommand that you replace them or add boot proms if possible. You can still use solutions such as etherboot but you need to have a diskette in the workstation during the boot process which is not a good idea.
Tell the BIOS to boot directly using PXE
Get some important hardware information (MAC address, type of mouse, type of keyboard, graphical resolution, screen frequencies, ...)
Remove the hard drives
That's all. You have nothing to install and nothing else to configure on the workstations. All the work will be done on the servers. Let's go...