On Sun, 28 Mar 1999, Cary O'Brien wrote:
> How small? It is pretty easy to make a boot floppy with
> linux + networking, but X and netscape are not going to fit
> on a floppy. Well... the QNX people have sort of done it.
Sort of here is no Netscape, no Java, and no X. It's their own web browser
ontop of their own Photon GUI. And there's a per-seat license which makes
it pretty discouraging for the sub-$1000 market.
Anyway, if your thin client is talking to a server on a LAN, there's two
more approaches to consider. The first is build a system that just runs an
X on the client, and runs Netscape on the server. This saves quite a bit
on the client side - you can run with as little as 8MB of RAM and a 486.
On the server side, there's an advantage too - every instance shares all
the shared libraries, etc., and it's much easier to implement web caching.
The second is to boot entirely across the network. You can have a copy of
the kernel sitting on the client, either on a floppy, flash device, etc,
and then NFS mount the rest of the OS.
You can take this even further - put a network boot loader into the
network card's EPROM socket. No disks at all. Look for the netboot
package for hints. And of course, you can combine the two approaches.
--
"Love the dolphins," she advised him. "Write by W.A.S.T.E.."
