On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 09:56:58PM -0500, Julian C. Dunn - Lists wrote:

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.

But, once you mount NFS root from the remote server, then X-terminal is looking at the same "root filesystem" as it would have from local harddisk. Maintaince/administration is the same. The only "edge" that LTSP brought to the table was network boot.

...

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.

X-terminal still requires motherboard, ethernet card, power supply, and case; in other word, still a computer without disks. I meant just connecting second set of monitor/keyboard/mouse to a computer, ie. one motherboard with 2 video cards (for 2 monitors), 2 keyboards (USB), and 2 mouses (USB). I'm wondering if there are market for such things... -- William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org> Linux solution for data management and processing. -- 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