Dave Sherman wrote: > > At 12:43 PM 04/23/2001 -0500, you wrote: > >I run our entire office of 35+ users off a 330Mhz sparc/512MB with > >Solaris and a dual 800 Mhz pentium III/512MB with Linux. We run Autocad, > >StarOffice, Netscape, and an inventory control/sales analysis/accounting > >package which is a mix of gnome / text applications (the text apps are > >being ported to gnome when I have the odd moment free from reading this > >list). > > > >I do about 2 hours of admin / week, and we haven't had any downtime since > >we switched to Linux (no nines, just a one and zero's...). > > > >We bought 35 neoware X-Terminals in 1994 for use with SCO Unix. We have had > >0 terminal failures in a little more than 6 years of continuous use. They > >run gnome > >and autocad perfectly, neither of which existed when the terminals were built. > > Are these terminals ethernet or serial-based? I've been thinking about this > (an ethernet-based solution, using some older 486 and low-end Pentium PCs > with no hard drives as "thin clients") for a while myself, for my home, but > never really researched the idea -- I knew it was possible, just not > exactly how. > Ethernet based. It's pretty easy to build an X-terminal. I've used all-in-one mainboads with 32Mb of RAM and a 300Mhz Cyrix processor. I used to pick up 10Mb Trendware ethernet cards 'cause it was easy to burn a ROM with a netboot image, but the latest trendware cards don't work. It might make more sense to buy a $10 floppy drive and internally mount it with a boot loader floppy inserted. Once you have the hardware setup you need to build a kernel that supports the hardware and load it over the net. You need to setup a ramdisk that supports the utilities you need to boot with. After that you can either NFS mount a root filesystem or load in a pre-rolled ramdisk image. Depends on what you need. It's pretty straightforward. I did most of this as a fallback source of X-terminals about 3 years ago. At that time the LTSP group was pretty incomprehensible. It's probably worth your time to check what they have to offer now. Kent