Re: Cheap hardware X-terms?

[Evan Leibovitch <evan@starnix.com>]

On Tue, 21 Sep 1999, Doug Loss wrote:

> I was talking with Roman yesterday when Sun's new Sun Ray system came
> up.  Sun Ray is a form of network end station that doesn't run
> applications locally but on a server.  For the life of me I can't quite
> figure out how it's much different from an X-terminal.

It's not very different, excapt that I believe it has some browser
and Java client smarts built in.

> From what I can see, if a Sun Ray goes bad you should be able to
> unplug it, plug another in, and be at pretty much the same spot you
> were previously.  Roman tells me that the Sun Rays are stateless,
> which may mean that you can resume work where you left off after the
> situation I described above, but I don't know that for sure.

This is indeed's Sun's desire for how the world does computing, to
concentrate on big servers running at ISPs that store your files for you,
etc.

If you're a fan of Linux and open source software, IMO, this model is bad
news. I've written a column on the issue for ZDNet:
http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/linux/news/0,6423,2337626,00.html

> I know that some of the folks here have talked and have tried to
> implement X-terminals on older hardware as a way to extend the useful
> life of existing systems.  We've generally talked about installing Linux
> on those systems and setting them up as X-terms.  I was remembering from
> my long-ago days as a ComputerLand hardware tech that most ethernet
> cards had (and still have) sockets for boot PROMS, which allow them to
> be seen by the system as bootable devices.  That would mean that the
> system could boot from a boot image file somewhere on the network rather
> than from a floppy or harddrive in the machine.  We used to do this from
> Novell and IBM networks.

That kind of technology exists already. A company called Igel makes
a plug-in ISA card that allows any PC to act as a diskless workstation:
http://www.igel.de/htmle/etc.htm

> What would it take to develop X-terminal boot PROMs?  If we could do
> something like that, any system could be turned into an X-terminal just
> by slapping a boot PROM on an ethernet card and installing it.

Have a look at

http://www.han.de/~gero/netboot/english/introduction.html
http://cuiwww.unige.ch/info/pc/remote-boot/howto.html
http://www.slug.org.au/etherboot/

> I apologize if I've gotten too technical here, but I think there's some
> potential here for a _very_ easy way to convert older systems into
> X-terms.  Discussion?

I would personally wonder if old systems (ie, 486s that rarely come with
more than 16MB of RAM) are up to the task of doing decent X service.
Call up a single mainstream like Netscape or WordPerfect and you're
swapping like crazy -- and I find the prospect of swapping over a
network link to be downright chilling.


-- 
evan leibovitch <evan@starnix.com>                            starnix inc.
tollfree: 1-87-pro-linux                         brampton, ontario, canada
http://www.starnix.com              professional linux services & products