On Sat May 27 2000 at 20:40, "Christopher K. George" wrote:
> How do I use a pc as an XTerminal. I have a bunch of old 80x486s and one
> nice PII400. Is there a way that I can run my 486s as XTerminals without
> having to go through a local login?
Yes. But perhaps not quite how you might think. The low-end
clients do need to be running linux, and they might need to have a
good amount of ram in them.
One way is to put a small linux system on them, enough to run an X
server and enough to do basic system config and networking. You can
nfs mount much of their filesystems from your p400.
Another way is to do boot the clients nfsroot (diskless, over a
network). nfsroot only needs a boot floppy with a kernel on it, and
a server all set up to do what is needed.
There are several HOWTOs about doing all this sort of stuff. It's
magic to get it all working, and with a fast 100Mb LAN and fast hard
drives on the nfsroot server, it is just as quick as running it from
the local hard drives.
If you have PXE boot proms in the ethernet cards on the clients,
then you don't even need to boot from a floppy - even this can be
done over a network.
> I'm new to linux but I've been doing C at hardware level for 5+ years,
> for whatever that's worth.
Configure and run xdm or gdm, after modifying their config files on
your server ("login") box to listen to a network socket with xdmcp
(port 177). You can even stop it from starting up a local x server,
just listen to a network socket. (With gdm, the config file is
/etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf - and make sure you also have
/etc/hosts.{allow,deny} configured for access as it uses
tcp_wrappers). Then on your clients, do:
X :3 -query boghog &
and watch the magic happen.
In an X term running on your client box, do:
Xnest :4 -query bighog &
to witness even more stunning feats :)
I do this sort of stuff frequently. (Unix has been able to run
remote X almost ever since it emerged from the primordial... :)
Cheers
Tony
