At 02:39 PM 04/23/2001 -0500, you wrote: >Dave Sherman wrote: > > 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 Cool. Thanks. Dave Sherman SoftServ Business Systems, Inc. "Quid quid latine dictum sit, webmaster at ssbs.com altum viditur." (763) 569-9839