On Sun, Aug 13, 2000 at 06:22:59PM -0400, Spinfire Magenta wrote: > on Sun, Aug 13, 2000 at 03:12:13PM -0700, kmself@ix.netcom.com spewed > forth on stone tablets: > > > Servers, workstations, or what? While I could see a departmental > > file/print/mail server, or a firewall system with reasonable > > traffic, and possible a limited task workstation or X terminal, > > based off of a 486, I'd have a really hard time seeing someone using > > this as a full locally-homed GUI workstation. > > Actually, a 486 is surprisingly capable. I manage a small switched > fast ethernet network of debian machines, consisting of a fast > application server/workstation machine (Athlon 800) and a 3 486's and > low end pentiums as X stations (with 'X --query fooserver'). With the > switched network the performance is incredible and is nearly > transparent to the user. > > Also, my site (http://isomerica.net) performs quite a few tasks > including mail server, web server, mysql server, stereo :), and more i > can't think of at the moment. This machine is only a pentium 133. > Goes to show that linux can surely save an old machine from the dump. This I could believe. The problem with a fully homed workstation is that the combination of "typically desired" userland apps and support tend to pig out anything with less than 48-64 MB RAM, and performance may benefit from 128+ with sufficient memory intensive apps. Eg: Gnome, Netscape, StarOffice, etc. Running the station as an X terminal is very believeable. Have you considered VNC by any chance? -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://www.netcom.com/~kmself Evangelist, Opensales, Inc. http://www.opensales.org What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Debian GNU/Linux rocks! http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ K5: http://www.kuro5hin.org GPG fingerprint: F932 8B25 5FDD 2528 D595 DC61 3847 889F 55F2 B9B0
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