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?"

Comments

Linux Terminal Server Project

[Bazzargh]

(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.