on Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 12:56:35PM -0600, Mark Gillingham (markgill@greatbooks.org) wrote:
> I'm a newbie, but have some experience with rdesktop and Terminal
> Services on W2K. That is, I think it would be suitable for some
> purposes at our foundation.
> We have a number of old Zeos (AMD5x86) boxes with 300MB drives that
> are all alike so parts are available. I installed X11 on one and
> noticed that it took about 65% of the drive. I don't have X working
> yet (I need to configure for S3 Trio) so I can't test for myself. In
> your opinion, am I wasting my time doing this? If I am not wasting my
> time, is rdesktop suitable for my purpose of displaying normal Windows
> apps (e.g., Office). Thanks for your thoughts.
Summary points:
- You can do this.
- You may not want to.
- Using slightly beefier HW may be an advantage.
The main problem with 486 hardware is that it's over a decade old. You
can probably count on failures, hard-to-find spares (though electronic
"junk" stores in your area may be useful. In the SF bay area, Halted
Electronic Supply and Weird Stuff are favorites.
If you do need to update any of the hardware, you're going to have
trouble locating:
- NICs
- Video cards.
- Memory
- Cables (some).
You probably don't need much else (maybe sound), though if you need a
hard drive you're going to be somewhat stuck. Floppies _shouldn't_ be
much trouble.
*Any* of your cards are going to be ISA rather than PCI. Again, there's
no new stuff being designed. Networking is likely going to be 4-10Mb/s
tops, rather than 100-1000 Mb/s current. While you don't need Gig-e for
X terms, 4-10 Mb/s _will_ be slow.
The biggest problem I see is that 486s had really minimal video support.
640x480, *maybe* 800x600 if you're lucky. A small color pallet,
probably 256 max (8-bit). And dog-slow performance. Not a major issue
for basics of X terminals and some office apps, but other things may
more or less precisely suck.
Given that you can probably turn up Pentium or PII HW cheap or free for
the taking, I'd look at this.
My recommendation: If you want to use the odd 486 for a _text_ based
terminal, or _very_ limited graphics station, go ahead. Otherwise,
shoot for some slightly newer hardware.
Otherwise, take a look at the GNU/Linux Terminal Server Project:
http://www.ltsp.org/
Docs:
Quickstart:
http://www.ltsp.org/instructions-3.0.html
Full docs:
http://www.ltsp.org/documentation/ltsp-3.0-4-en.html
http://www.ltsp.org/documentation/ltsp-3.0-4-en.ps
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
D00D PL33Z 1 N33D CH347 C0D35 FOR GC0NF !!!
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