Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2000 21:29:49 -0800 (PST) From: nsayer@quack.kfu.com To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Discussion invited: Netpliance i-opener X terminal transmogrification Message-ID: <200003210529.VAA07072@morpheus.kfu.com>
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For those who haven't heard, the netpliance (http://www.netpliance.com/) is close enough to a PC that it can boot and run the traditional i386 OSes for the most part. People are trading hints on how to add hard disks to them. I have a different idea. The thing has 16M of flash. This looks like a job for..... (drum roll) PicoBSD!!!!! Seriously, what I have in mind is turning the thing into an X terminal. IMHO the humble X terminal is not given the respect it deserves. :-) In our youth we hated them because they were a pain in the ass to set up, usually needing to net-boot and stuff. But with everything required in flash, it becomes a whole lot faster to boot, and the thing even becomes portable (with suitable DHCP support). Has anyone tried sort of 'embedded X' before? What's the minimum requirement for running XF86_SVGA? Just looking at the shared libraries and the executable, they look like they take about 4M or so. Even adding the kernel and a bunch of supporting stuff it doesn't look like running up against the 16M flash limit will be too likely. There probably is even room for a few MB of fonts. One question that jumps to mind is how to get the name of the font server over DHCP. The server can send the name with 'option font-servers', and even an xdm address with 'option x-display-manager', but how do you get those out? Are they part of the dhclient-script environemnt or something? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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