Slashdot Mirror
Legacy X-Terminal Software?
Feren asks: "While working on a project for a non-profit organization I'm involved with, I recently acquired a batch of Sun Microsystem "XTerminal-1" machines, along with one or two Tektronix machines. With the Sun X-terminals I've been able to kludge together a sort of working system to get them to boot and run X, although when I read Sun's documentation, they talk about such things as the 'Xserver jumbo patch' or 'SPARC Xterminal(TM)software version 2.0' as being a better way to make them run. Yet I can't find this software anywhere, and the Sun rep I speak with regularly at my real job is just as clueless as I am about these devices and their software. I have the sneaking feeling these products hit their EOL (End Of Life) quite some time ago. Similarly I cannot find any information on where to locate/download/purchase software for the Tektronix boxes. Has anybody ever gotten ahold of this elusive software? Has anybody ever considered building a site for legacy X devices such as these, like a repository for software?"
"I know the software licenses used to be a huge boon to the Xterminal manufacturers, but since most of them aren't supporting these devices anymore (nor even have spare copies of documentation or software to sell individuals like myself) I wouldn't predict there being a great deal of trouble in obtaining permission to post this software for general consumption, so long as there was no charge to retrieve it.
Would there be any interest in such a site or repository if it was created? Does anybody know where to get the software to run these machines? Granted, they're not fast or the latest word in thin-client, but they are still usable and relatively cheap to acquire... if you can only find the software to make them go."
One nice thing about XTerms is after you configure them, it's very hard to mess them up.
In our math department we have three labs of terminals (two are Tektronix NC4XX terminals, and the other has much newer SunRay1 terminals) as well as various NCD, Tek, and Sun terms all throughtout the building. The various terminals are on a switched 10/100BT network with 1000BT running to the servers. No hard drives on the terminals, just power them up, they grab their (tiny) bits of boot code off a tftp server, and bring up an extensive menu of options (WinDD to Windows/Citrix servers, XDMCP to the Sun and Linux servers, Telnet/SSH to various machines, etc). The best part is, it doesn't matter which terminal you're on or where you are. And when a terminal breaks (rare), just swap it for a different one. The whole setup works beautifully.