From: mark@taylor.uucp (Mark A. Davis) Subject: Re: X terminals: Suggestion for projects like SLS, MCC, etc. Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1993 18:29:49 GMT
hagan@freya.cs.umass.edu (Craig I. Hagan) writes:
>Actually, if you only use a linuxbox for X, the maintenance is zip.
>(from experience, i have had a 386 up and running X for about 4 months,
>running only X, and minimal OS stuff). Since there is little filesystem
>activity, i don't worry about the disk being corrupted.
As long as you have no hardware problems or OS problems (mostly OS problems
IE: full filesystems, corrupt file systems, login stuff, etc...)
>As for time of setup, for linux machines, its actually pretty fast.
>The first machine takes ~1/2-1hr. The rest of the machines
>can be setup by copying the harddrive of the first machine,
>which is about 5 minutes. (I setup my 386 by doing this off
>of my linux development machine).
If all your machines are the same, yes.
>I feel that the extra amount of admin that is required to be
>performed on a machine running X vs an Xterminal isn't that
>high (all you need is one backup, routines aren't necessary).
>It pretty much comes down to the question: do you prefer
>X in prom, on your local harddrive, or on a remote harddrive?
It would still seem that an EEPROM solution would be easier and more reliable.
It is easily upgraded, and has nothing to become corrupt. But that would
work well only with just an Xserver program, not a whole OS like Linux.
>Since linux can run X in as little as 5.5MB for the Xserver,
>libs, and a few local xapps (if anyone has doubts, i will
>gladly tar up my X directories and provide them),
>and there is room for it to be stripped even more than what i have
>done, X can be run on as little as a machine with as
>little as a 20mb hard drive, and 4mb core (i know...),
>if it is going to be solely an Xstation.
The 4 MB of RAM is going to be tuff. Most small Xterminals have 4MB, but only
1 - 1.5 MB is used for the server. Under linux, even when minimally configured,
you still have to load the OS, the server, drivers, and other stuff. It may
not leve enough free room to do much (unless you configure swap, but that
will then further hurt performance).
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