Re: dumb terminals and Red Hat Fedora Linux 2 (Thanks for the Help!)

On Fri, Apr 01, 2005 at 01:47:03PM -0600, Jack Taffar wrote: Jack - you may already have the hardware you need for use as X-terminals/thin clients. see http://www.ltsp.org This is a "semi-distribution" (you add it to something like fedora) This software lets you use multiple PC's as X-terminals from a single server. (A 1.6 GHz Celeron w/1GB RAM can run 10 clients,YMWV ) How it works: Using any old PC clone hardware (486 or better) with at least 32MB of RAM (more is better) you set the PC up to boot program called "etherboot" or "PXE" . (Can be booted from a floppy, hard drive, cd-rom, ROM or from any ethernet card with a Boot rom on it) Both etherboot and PXE use the network interface to: A: get a DHCP IP address B: use tftp to fetch a small, bootable linux kernel over the LAN Then - the small kernel boots, load X-Windows, and viola - instant X-terminal. In addition to old PC's there are new boxes designed from scratch to be thin client X-terminals. Both will work superbly well. Where to get ethernet cards with etherboot roms on them: http://www.disklessworkstations.com http://www.disklessworkstations.com/cgi-bin/web/scan/fi=products/st=db/co... A guy who works at that (above) company started and leads the LTSP Open Source project, Jim McQuillan. -- http://kinz.org http://www.fedoranews.org Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.