Re: [uug] Ancient Hardware and Linux

[Andrew Jorgensen]

X alone should be fine in 16MB, even recent versions. I'd recommend using XDMCP for session management if you have a dedicated machine it can talk to. For most session managers (gdm, kdm, xdm) there's a single line in some config file to enable XDMCP. Then you just have the client machine query the server for a session and you get a login screen just like you'd have on the server. You can even configure the server to allow remote connections to it's X font server and the client to get it's fonts from there.

In that kind of a configuration there's really nothing running on the client but X.

You might also consider VNC. There's a vnc viewer for svgalib. VNC doesn't have the performance of X, but it's good enough even over 10Mbps.

If you find that 16MB isn't enough you might look into TinyX (part of the XFree86 project). I don't know much about it except what it's supposed to do.

I'd like to try this myself someday. When you get it working tell us how it went.

- Andrew

Ross Werner wrote:

I was looking more to just run X as a "thin client" and run apps over the
network. Would 16MB of RAM still be painful for that?

~ Ross

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Michael Golden wrote:

I used to run an old version of Slackware with fvwm2 for the window
manager on a 486 DX2 66. I think it had 32MB RAM and it ran decent but
YMMV. Don't even expect a DE or big apps like Mozilla or OOo to work on
it though. NS4 was the browser I used at the time on that box and it was
dog slow.

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