Re: X-Terminals (was: [seul-edu] It's quiet--_too_ quiet.)

[Ray Olszewski <ray@comarre.com>]

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I do know the procedure for setting up X
Terminals that you describe below. It's well documented at several Web
sites, and others on this list have impmeneted it (or something closely akin
to it) quite successfully.

What I was looking at here was the possibility of integrating the
client-side approaches of the Open Classroom project -- approaches that
combine Linux and DOS applications on the same clients; go to
www.openclassroom.org and follow the client-side links for the details --
with sometime use of the same clients as X Terminals. What I found is that
that approach will work nicely with '486s with 16 mB RAM. I've also in the
past experimented with yet other variants, such as using '486s in pairs, one
as an X Terminal, the other as an app server, to improve speed. What
impresses me is the variety of ways that do work, making this general idea
suitable for answering a good range of needs.

I abandoned the project not out of frustration, but because I have no need
to deploy X Terminals at the moment, and others who do are moving the
development of Linux-based X Terminals along quite nicely. Were I to need
large numbers of dedicated X Terminals, I am sure I would do something
similar to what you describe ... and certainly anyone else on the list who
has a need to recycle old hardware into X Terminals should consider your
approach.

At 02:17 PM 10/19/99 -0500, jwaddell@ix.netcom.com wrote [in part]:
>Thought I might have seen that you are going about this incorrectly,
>perhaps due for a reason, perhaps not.... :)
....
>... To set up an Xterminal you decide which box will be
>serving the X Applications (including the windowmanager,gnome, kde,
>whatever) and you run xdm (gdm, or kdm if you want to play with alpha
>level software) on that application server.  You then set up a boot
>sequence on the machine that is to be a terminal (booting from floppy,
>rom, nfs, tftp, cdrom, or harddrive) that does the following, boot's to
>network runlevel and in the inittab runs a script that {an example of a
>working script for this can be found in SuSE's a packages on suse's that
>will set a machine up to boot this way, I think it's called xdmterm or
>something, can find out if you need to know...} along with running all the
>normal getty's for virtual console runs a bare X server (the X server as
>you will recall servers the physical display on a computer up to xclient
>applications to use as their display) that queries the application server
>for a GRAPHICAL login.  You can do that be hand, by first running xdm on
>the application server, and then running X -query appservername, to help
>you get started reading the info and/or man pages on xdm will help.   XDM
>is how large installations (universities, etc) manage hundreds (perhaps
>sometimes thousands) of xterminals on a network.....

------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA           	 	         ray@comarre.com        
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