Inquiry from the New Guy

[Charles H. Root, III]

Greetings All:

I'm looking for some pointers regarding a Linux workstation rollout
project I am working on. Here's the scoop:

ASG has over 600 existing PC's running MS DOS 6.2, NIC & mouse drivers
and the ICA Client for DOS. You power them up, autoexec.bat launches the
ICA Client and you are presented with a Windows login screen. Simple
configuration and a perfect end user experience for our environment. Over
90% of our staff gets their desktop environment from a Citrix server farm.

However, I have another 100 or so used workstations we've purchased arriving
soon. They are IBM 300GL PII 350's, 64 MB RAM, NIC and 4GB HDD. And (of
course)
no OS. Obviously, I don't want to spend over $20,000 in WinXP licenses just
to
dumb them down to MS-DOS.

What I wish to accomplish is to build a Linux based PC that boots directly
to
X Windows and the ICA client (bypassing the Linux login) and present the end
user with a Windows login prompt from our Citrix server farm, just like our
existing DOS workstations.

I've gotten some recommendations from Chad Robinson (A Linux Journal
magazine
contributing writer), an RHCE from UB and a few folks on the web. The flavor
of
these recommendations is:

* Do a minimal RedHat 8 install.

* Remove the getty statements in /etc/inittab to bypass the Linux login
prompt.

* Run the ICA Client as a shell in either run level 4 (Kiosk mode) or
  run level 5 (X Windows).

After I get a stable workstation config on one PC, the next step is to do
network installs on the remaining units. They don't have CD-ROM drives.

I've got management buy-in so I'm good there. I've already migrated our DNS,
FTP and web server over to RedHat.

Comments, tips, concerns? I'm admittedly a little inexperienced in a
customized
rollout like this. I'd love to hear your thoughts and see if anyone else
locally
is doing this sort of thing.

Thanks for your time,

Charles H. Root, III
MIS Network Manager

Account Solutions Group
205 Bryant Woods South
Amherst, NY  14228-3608

v: 716-564-4991
f: 716-564-4440

www.accountsolutionsgroup.com