I'd second David. LTSP is really useful, but has to be worth the setup. Since this is only a short-time thing. I think you could use LiveCD to boot the machine. Then you could connect with that to another workstation. Alternately, there is NX, VNC, etc.
Of course, you could just do the X-forward stuff over SSH. All in all, this is all dependant on the user's knowledge. I'm assuming he is capable of learning. >From any of this, you could base the system on some random LiveCD, probably want to pick one that is light on resources. JSR/ -----Original Message----- From: UM Linux User's Group [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Zakar Sent: Friday, November 04, 2005 12:21 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [UM-LINUX] Making on old machine a useful terminal I've used LTSP before - actually wrote a paper about it as a class project. It is rather non-trivial to implement. What I would suggest is making use of XDMCP. I'm sure there's some way to specify using it on boot. -DMZ On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 11:16 -0500, Angelo Bertolli wrote: > This is the one I would use, but I never had a chance: > http://ltsp.org/ > > Nick Cummings wrote: > > > We have two old machines sitting around the office (both are something > > like Pentium 200 MHz with 64 MB of RAM) and we have a visitor for a > > few months with no computer to use at the moment. I'd like to make > > one of those a useful terminal, probably just something that could run > > X so the user could ssh to another machine and run programs on the > > remote machine. Is anyone aware of a good (preferably easy to setup > > and manage) distro for what I want that will work on that sort of > > hardware? > > > > I'm not sure if this is exactly what people mean when they say "thin > > client", but I thought that was the right direction, so I did some > > looking. I found, for example, ThinStation > > > > http://thinstation.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/ThIndex > > > > which looks like it might work. I'm wondering if any of you have > > tried doing something like this and have suggestions as to a best > > bet. As I said, ease is a pretty big priority here, so a fairly > > ready-made solution is what I'm seeking. > > > > Nick > >
