SunRay is a thin X-client from Sun. They can be used for hot-desking and working-from-home. They support multiheaded (upto 16 displays) and have an RDP client that works with Windows Vista (and XP and 2000 and 2003 Server...). Don’t even bother trying to hack linux enough to make it work with the Sunray server software, just use Solaris. It works out of the box with Solaris 10 and the latest patch kit. A dedicated Sunray interconnect is do-able but probably doesn’t fit most people’s network topology, so just use a shared network and your existing DHCP servers with the Sun specific boot options added in. If you don’t care about firmware versions, then you can just add the X-Display-Manager (Option 41) option your DHCP server. Search google for more on this.
SunRay 4 Update 2 is the latest and is pretty slick, but the web interface requires tomcat and I couldn’t be bothered to install that. I’ve never done anything useful with the web interface in the past.
The SunRay clients are supposed to support:
SunRay clients will try and detect a suitable resolution from your monitor on boot. This works fine most of the time, but not for widescreen monitors or projectors. Projectors always get detected as 640×480, which is useless. You can force resolutions on the SunRay client using utresadm but this requires some other user settings tweaked to work with it. I’ve not yet managed to reliably get one SunRay to run at a specified solution. Hopefully Sun will address this one day and make it easier/work properly!
The latest version of the firmware now includes a menu system - press Stop S on your Sun keyboard to bring this up. You can manually configure IP, SunRay server, VPN and so on from here. Stop A will reboot the SunRay client.