Today, a little bundle of joy arrived.

Specifically, a package containing a VIA EPIA M10000G motherboard, a Mini-ITX case, and 512 MB of RAM. It all went together smoothly, and now sits in Karen's office as her very own Linux machine.

I suppose it's technically not a Linux machine. It's a "thin client" — minimal CPU, minimal memory (the 512MB was overkill, but it was a great price) and no drives at all; hence, no operating system. It boots from the network; my file server (which now acts as the household DHCP server) gives it a name and an IP address, then instructs it to download its operating system from another machine, which I've set up with LTSP (the Linux Terminal Server Project).

Basically, it downloads a minimal Linux environment, just enough to set up an X session (the Linux graphical interface) and log in to the LTSP machine, which is far more powerful. When she starts a program, it displays on her thin client, though it's actually running on the LTSP box. It's a nifty setup, and one that's starting to gain in popularity in educational environments due to the much lower cost per unit.

Still a couple of wrinkles to iron out: I set her up with KDE, which is being stubborn about redirecting sound output to the client, and the BIOS desperately needs updating to work around a couple of video issues. But with no disks, I'll have to make a USB stick with the BIOS updater on it, and naturally all my bootable sticks are in hiding.