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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?"
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.
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.