Thinclient – is it right for me?

Hi,

I work for a POS company. We have a couple hundred retail pcs (xp boxes) located across the country which interact with 1 centrally located server (linux) in AZ. My boss is looking in the direction of thinclient to lower costs, and I’m left wondering where would I even begin to find out if this is feasible.

I understand the general idea of a thinclient. Most of the computing is done on a server over a network to allow for use of outdated clients. But I have questions like will it work over the internet, with one server when clients are using dsl? What would I need to change? Can it work under a windows-linux relationship?

Any help/comments would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.