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Whatever Happened To The Thin X11 Terminals?
GregK asks: "Once upon a time (in the fun, fast 80's), you could find a different
kind of X-box, a thin client that ran X!! and did little local
processing. These boxes had a monitor, keyboard, and a thin box
of electronics to communicate on an ethernet port and run an X11 server locally. Whatever happened to this kind of thing? I ask because I'm interested in putting a thin client in my bedroom, and leave my Linux server in the basement. A wireless connection could send the data over the two floors, and in an ideal world I'd have a color LCD monitor (24 bit or more) connected to a wireless transceiver. The monitor would not have a fan or a hard drive, but would be able to run X11. This would let me have an always-on connection without an always-loud presence in my bedroom. Now the best I can come up with is a modified, old laptop with the hard drive ripped out, and a boot disk/CD-R combination that would let the CPU boot and read the X software into memory. But there has to be better! Can anyone help?"
TRY GOOGLE !!!
I have a friend who is selling his. All he did to it was flash the bios. He never hooked up a hard drive or modified the inside.
Of course, if you are looking for a nice flat panel monitor, then don't go with an Iopener.
BookPC - Cheap $300, uses intel 810 (supported by Linux) mother board and has good audio, SVGA and SVideo outputs, Celeron, and a DVD player all in a box the size of a math textbook. This might be ideal for a thin client. Unlike the Iopener, you can use your own monitor.
Keeping
(this got a mention in a previous article today, talking about using it in schools)
Anyway http://www.ltsp.org/ is a good place to start looking. They have a list of links which includes http://www.disklessworkstations.com/ (which sells parts and premade). This isnt quite what you're looking for as you want _fanless_ as well as diskless - all of those are basically cut down PCs and have a normal processor with a fan.
They also have instructions for building your own:
http://www.ltsp.org/contrib/fanless_howto.html
as you might guess from the link this is for fanless too. This discusses mostly normal form factor diskless, but a biscuit PC (search for PC-104) might be more like what you're after. As the author says, these are likely to have hardware that's so nonstandard as to be unusable for diskless operation, but its worth a try. Given how these things are used its _very_ likely that someone has built a linux kernel for some PC-104 boards out there. They also usually seem to be very very slow in comparison to similarly priced AT motherboards (because the sales volume is low), but don't let this put you off: your machine doesnt need to be fast.
This lot: http://www.supertek.com.tw/home.htm do thin clients too. Their site is v e r y s l o w.
We just cleared half a dozen Tektronix X-terminals from our store cupboard. They were mono, 19" monitors, 4MB of RAM.
They came from a lab that now has ten colour Tektronix X-terminals, with 8MB of RAM and 17" monitors.
Tektronix no longer make X-terminals. However, you may find the ones by NCD useful, since thats what we'll probably end up buying to refit the lab next year. www.ncd.com
The only problem you may have with servers in your basement and an X-term in your loft is that its an awful long walk to put a CD or floppy in the drive. And if you want sound, you have to make sure your apps can talk whatever protocol the Xterm uses for sound. Not a problem in our lab where we dont want the students making noises!
Baz
I recomend a Sun Sparcstation SLC or XLC. It is basically a complete diskless SPARC integrated with a 17" black and white monitor. A plus is that there is no fan involved.
I boot mine from my Linux box using the SLXT package (based on a linux kernel) and it works well. The only downside is that it takes several minutes to boot over the network. There's an (out of date) article about it at http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue27/little.html
An alternative to SLXT is XKernel
Steve.
A latent existence
I have a brand new (3 months old) NCD NC900 on my desk. Just a simple X server connected to a Sony flat screen montior, running lots of colors (but not enough, I can still get the old color flash when I change windows if I run the right apps)
The bad news: This system is more expensive then a PIII with a good graphics card running linux. Sure it is quiet (but you can get quiet systems if you try. Underclock, big heat sink, no CPU fan, power supply with an adjustable speed fan. (pc power and cooling will set you up with most of this, and they have good quality - worth the cost) IS doesn't like the PC solution though, as they have to manage it, the NCD costs nothing for them to manage, the PC needs more support. (This even though the PCs we have are just X servers, we run all our applications on Sparcs in the server room)
One option: put the pc on the other side of the wall. This might or might not work for you, but it is an option if your cable lenghts won't get too long and you don't mind the restricive placement.
There's a Linux distribution (xdenu) that boots from 2 floppies and runs X. I don't know if it's still available - and I'm too lazy to search ;-)
About a year ago I had it running on a 486 with 8MB RAM, S3 graphics card and 3c509 ethernet card. With that little memory it didn't have enough left over to support many apps, but 16MB should do the trick.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
Aren't G3 Cubes fanless? Get one of those and run Linux on it, or OSX+X on the BSD.
This is not perhaps a cheap solution, but should be a quiet one.
These days you'll find most thin client machines running gasp! WinCE and Termincla Server/Metaframe clients, but there are still people making X terminals I'm sure.
For example, Wyse offer X11 as an option on some of their their winterm products.
What else could you try...if a web browser is enough for you then something like a dreamcast might do, although I dunno how easy it is to get broadband support for them.
Oh, I suppose if you don't mind DIY you could run cables from server room to your bedroom. Videk, for example (you may have a better local supplier for this sort of thing) make all sorts of little toys: devices to boost the signal so you can use 50m mouse, keyboard and monitor cables; boxes that let you run 1600x1200 video over 120m of twisted pair, etc.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Not sure why your "only" solution involves rigging up an old laptop. Maybe that's because you only have an old laptop lying around. You can buy used X terminals on eBay by the dozen, and several companies still make new ones (see IBM and NCD for starters), which you might have found if you took a minute to do a simple web search. X Terminals have waned somewhat in popularity since it's become so easy to make them out of old PCs. If you have a batch of old 486s or Pentiums with the same video and network hardware, it shouldn't take a decent admin more than a day or two to put together a workable kickstart installer that'll burn all the necessary packages and configs onto a blank machine.
You could also take any PC, say, a 486 or better with, say, a 300MB hard drive or a BIOS that supports booting from CD, and throw a Linux or BSD image on it that just boots with DHCP and XDM running.
Or you could buy one of Oracle's $199 New Internet Computers (see thinknic.com) and burn a modified disk image CD that comes up with XDM in broadcast mode instead of doing a local login. Others seem to have done it. You may want to spend a minute or two searching, say, Google or the old Deja archives before asking Slashdot when something is this easy to find.
NCD (http://www.ncd.com) still produces these. Depending on which model you get, there may or may not be any fan on them. They have NVRAM which can be hard coded with the network information or you can use bootp. Either way, you use tftp to download a configuration file to the client and then log into your linux box.
As far as getting one pretty cheap - try university surplus auctions. I know at the university I used to work at, we surplused about 600 of these things - all working.
Elwing
Sun Ray
For a while I was thinking of doing the same thing myself, but it's really not worthwhile. Here's why:
Cost: X-terminals are cool, but very expensive for what they do. New ones will run you about as much as a fairly high-end x86 box, while used ones will be about the same as a used Pentium MMX type machine.
Colours: Most only support 8-bit colour. That's a real pain in the ass unless all you're running is a bunch of xterms. If you run netscape + other graphical apps, you're bound to either have to deal with a hideous display, or deal with colour flashing when you switch focus. Even if you limit yourself to one colourful app at a time you'll still have to deal with the uglyness of 8-bit colour.
Sound: There *are* protocols for getting sound from a server to some of the NCD x-terminals, but that's yet another headache to deal with.
Software: Even though the hardware is relatively easy to get used, you'll still need an x-server to boot the terminal from. Depending on the model you get, you may have to actually go and buy this, or find an "unscrupulous" copy on the 'net somewhere. Also you'll have to jump through a few hoops to configure your linux box as a boot server, although there is a HOWTO on that floating around somewhere.
Unless you absolutely *need* to have the linux box up 24/7 as a server, I'd recommend just shutting down at night when you don't need it. Sure, you won't be able to claim huge uptimes, but IMO, that's kind of a silly excuse. If you just need a smallish web-server running, do what I did and get an older box and put it in a closet somewhere; I've got an old 486 running apache and mysql for some web stuff, and it works great for what I need. My desktop box (which *is* in my bedroom right now) gets turned off at night. This also helps with the power-bill slightly.
It's only software!
nuff said..
Running many modern X apps over the network is a pain in the ass anyway.
Many window managers, desktop environments and graphical applications put more strain on X's networked architecture than it can handle, leading to (even more) sluggish performance compared to what you get running apps locally.
Youre better off buying a real PC for less $$$ and running apps remotely from that if you need to, as well as being able to run bandwidth-intensive apps locally.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
There seem to be a few ASCII terminals still in production, which says something about the tenacity of legacy technology. But the whole concept of a dedicated terminals runs up against a basic economic fact: it's cheaper to build a workstation capable of emulating a terminal than it is to build a terminal. Counterintuitive, but true. Workstations are a mass commodity, and benefit from economies of scale. This was already true when the first X Terminals were manufactured. So X Terminals never got popular enough to accumulate the inertia that ASCII terminals still seem to have.
The "thin client" fad that was so big a couple years ago was a completely different animal. These were not "terminals" in any sense. They were simply a specialized kind of diskless workstation.
So get a quiet PC. It's doable. Use IDE disks instead of SCSI. Use acoustic enclosures and drive sleeves, and low-noise power supplies. Quietpc.com has some interesting stuff.
It's too bad we seem to be stuck with internal power supplies -- blowing away their own heat the way they do is not very efficient. A long time ago, I worked for the old Convergent Technologies, the pre-PC company that mostly made workstations for Burroughs/Unisys. One of their nicest jobs was the NGen, a system which used only modular (no one-size-fits-all), external, fanless, silent power supplies. Of course, the NGen was also a proprietary platform, which is why you never heard of it.
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