I think I may have thrown everyone off a bit with the terms "thin client"
and "terminal". There's no terminal server set up that I want to use it
with or anything like that. I don't know much about such things. I was
just thinking of something that will run X and ssh so the user can login
to other machines and run stuff on them (presumably using X forwarding).
We actually scraped together a lot more RAM for one of the systems, which
is now a Pentium-200 with 256 MB of RAM (and some ancient video card).
So, I guess I probably just need a distro that will run decently on a
processor that slow, be easy to install and configure, and be relatively
user friendly. The user in question is familiar with
*nix. There's an added wrinkle, which is that the BIOS is apparently so
old that it does not allow booting from a CD directly, so I guess I'll
need some way of using a boot floppy to boot from the CD.
As I've said before, I'm a big fan of Ubuntu, but I don't think it's the
tool for this job (too heavy for this CPU). I'm thinking maybe Damn Small
Linux is the way to go, since it comes on a live CD and says it will run
entirely from RAM in only 128 MB. They even have a boot floopy image to
use when you can't boot directly from CD. Still, the machine has a HD, so
it need not be a "live" distro.
Nick
On Fri, 4 Nov 2005, Ritchie, Josiah S. wrote:
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
