by
Brian Madden
There are really two parts to this story. First is the fact that a company called
WorkSpot is currently providing a
fully functional Linux desktop to web browsers in an Application Service Provide manner. Their
Gnome/
KDE/
Red Hat desktop has everything you would need on a workstation, including
Open Office,
KOffice,
Abi Word,
Gnumeric,
Ximian Evolution,
Gimp,
Mozilla,
GNU Cash. Each user gets 100MB of personal storage, and user files are also accesible via an HTML-based file manager or
WebDAV. What's truly amazing about this is that the whole package is available for
$9.95 per month with no contract required.
Surprisingly, WorkSpot's service offering does not make use of the Linux Terminal Server Project. Instead, they've created a modified version of VNC. In addition to their ASP service, WorkSpot has created the GNU Workspot Project. This GPL project packages their entire solution for anyone to use. They feel this project is a viable open-source competitor to Citrix MetaFrame and Microsoft Terminal Server.
Of course companies have to base their server-based computing platform decisions on the applications that they need. However, if a company only needs to provide basic office, web, email, and scheduling functionality for end users, a WorkSpot-based solution may be the answer.
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