On Sun, 2003-11-30 at 19:24, William Park wrote:

1. Does anyone know who is currently selling (Linux based) X-terminals?

X-terminal is the "canonical" solution for many situations. And, recent development in PXE network booting makes Etherboot, Netboot, Rom-a-matic, LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project), Mknbi-linux, Imggen, ... all obsolete. If you have 3c905 (what I have), then you can boot over network without above packages. I'm told you can also do that with Intel's ethernet card, as expected since PXE is Intel spec.

*Some* of those components would be obsolete with PXE. Etherboot/Netboot in particular. However LTSP has to do with the infrastructure on the server-side, so it is by no means obsoleted by the ability to netboot within the NIC's firmware.

2. Do you think there is much demand for 2, 3, or 4 users logging onto single computer? ie. "Linux mainframe".

That is, multiple sets of monitors, keyboards, and mouses hooked up to single computer; much like serial terminals, but with XDM. This would be primarily aimed at home market, where you want to have one computer serving 2, 3, or 4 users, but don't want to buy 2, 3, or 4 separate computers.

Earlier this year a fellow from a company called Display Works (?) did a presentation at TLUG about how he converted his company's internal staff to all use diskless X terminals running off a few Compaq servers running Linux with LTSP. I'm sure someone has the slides from his presentation sitting around somewhere. - Julian -- [ Julian C. Dunn <jdunn-JN5fZfbfKAtWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> * <julian at dreaming.org> ] [ WWW: www.aquezada.com/staff/julian/ * www.dreaming.org/~julian/ ] [ PGP: 0xFDC205B9 - 91B3 7A9D 683C 7C16 715F 442C 6065 D533 FDC2 05B9 ] [ "sometimes you win, sometimes you lose / and most times ] [ you choose between the two" - carole king, "sweet seasons" ] -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml