On Wed, 10 Feb 1999, Brian Gollum wrote:
> Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 11:16:03 -0500
> From: Brian Gollum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: slightly off topic
>
> At 09:59 PM 2/9/99 +0000, Geoff Blake wrote:
> >On Tue, 9 Feb 1999, Mark Phillips wrote:
> >> I have come by an NCD HMXpro X terminal. I have established that it is
> >> fully functional but that it is lacking the server side software.
> >
> >Pardon me, but isn't the X-terminal the server and will it not work with
> >*any* X-client running on your Linux boxes. Of course, the X-term. may
> >need loaded software, but my experience is that all X-terms, such as Tek.
> >etc. run from (E)PROM based firmware.
>
> This is all hazy since it's been several years since I dealt with
> these beasties, but I seem to remember it being something like this:
>
> The X server software for an NCD X terminal generally resides on a
> bootp host machine on the network. When the X terminal boots, it
> requests its configuration file, which has a name that matches the
> hexadecimal hardware address of the terminal's ethernet interface,
> from the bootp server configured in the X terminal's firmware. This
> file specifies various configuration details for the X terminal along
> with the name and location of the X server software. The terminal
> loads the server, configures it, and then runs. The terminal might
> load the software using tftp, now that I think about it, but you get
> the general idea.
>
> This scheme allows the software for the various X terminals on a
> heterogenous network to be maintained at a single location. If you
> have 2000 X terminals, you don't have 2000 sets of (E)PROMs to
> change or reprogram. It also allows you to customize each X terminal
> to its environment simply by editing a text file and rebooting the
> terminal; not all computers in a large enterprise are necessarily
> going to be running the same version of X.
>
OK OK OK - to the many respondents. I can see that X-terms could pick up
their "OS" from a network server and that could be quite advantageous
where there are more than a few X-terms on a system. However, those that
I have seen have nearly always been one per system and load from PROM or
the like.
Geoff
--
Geoff Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] linux 2.0.31
Chelmsford [EMAIL PROTECTED] i586
Intel create faster processors - Microsoft create slower processes
