Date: Thu, 27 Mar 97 10:30:01 CST From: Joe Greco <jgreco@solaria.sol.net> To: chris@bb.cc.wa.us (Chris Coleman) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Small Disk Xterminal Message-ID: <199703271630.KAA17000@solaria.sol.net> In-Reply-To: <no.id> from "Chris Coleman" at Mar 26, 97 10:56:59 pm
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> I have about 5 Hewlett Packard 486 DX66 Computers with 80 meg Hard drives. > I want to set them up as xterminals to run programs off of a larger > FreeBSD Server. I tried looking in the archives and found some discussion > on this topic. But I was unable to discover how this was resolved. Woooohoooooo!! It sounds like you might like something I've been playing with for quite some time now. I was very frustrated by the lack of netboot support for de-driver cards (else I would have used a diskless FreeBSD install). So I bludgeoned the following together: I have a not-very-polished set of tools that allows me to build a floppy disk (1.44MB) that contains a minimal (MINIMAL) FreeBSD configuration on an MFS filesystem. This is potentially very handy for things like small routers, terminal servers, etc. It is ALSO useful to build a minimal Xterminal (although the Xterminal requires an -ro NFS mount from someplace). It sounds to me like this (or some variation) might be just what you're looking for. You can use XDM on the host system to make it appear as though each PC is a "terminal" directly on the larger system. I do this - quite successfully - and use it on a daily basis. "dors.sol.net", "giskard.sol.net", and a few others are all diskless machines. I outfit a 486DX5/133 PCI MB with 32MB RAM, a PCI Ethernet card, a floppy/case/power supply, and my choice of good video card. I don't have to worry about backing up the machine or buying a hard drive, making it a really cool solution. I have one hooked up to a P6/200 with 256MB RAM, and the combo just smokes for doing all sorts of things. It's really cool to load the Linux emulator and then run xquake. Downside: no swap space (although I suppose you could NFS swap). If you don't have enough RAM, and RAM is cheap, it crashes. I rarely see less than 10MB free though. In your particular case, you could use the base system's hard drive for swap (or swap plus boot). It would not be too hard to do. If anyone is interested in seeing what I did, please let me know and I'll pack it up. ... JG
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