Making an X Terminal from a PC

PSwiss writes: "I recently wrote an article for Linux Gazette on how to make an X Terminal from an old PC (486s work great). It's a neat application of Linux and would make a good project for some weekend." This is a nice step-by-step guide ... we posted a similar project not too long ago, about diskless linux kiosks.

Comments

A good use...

[Karpe]

...for these X terminals would be to be put in public schools here in Brazil. Some public schools don't have even a single PC. If we could make people donate their old hardware to these schools, and buy a powerfull machine as the server, we could make some computer labs, and better, introduce young people to GNU/Linux. Here in my state, in the south of Brazil, public schools are already using preferentialy GNU/Linux, but that's another story.

But the people who should know how to do this are the responsibles for the schools' machines, most of the slashdot crowd had already thought and learned how to do that.

The bad thing is that most 486 didn't have good videocards, and the performance (no XAA?) of XFree86 with ISA cards is not great, even as an X-terminal only. I remember the performance of XFree with my Trident VLB, which sucked, even for that time. The only nice card in a 486 with XFree I used was a S3 VLB, but those are hard to find, even used, of course.

It would also be great if those IDE "disks" based on flash memory were cheaper. We could make very silent, self-sufficient (no network or floppy boot) machines. The devices don't even need a large memory, or "disk". Good to make some "NCs" (fancy name for something that exists for at least 10 years in the X world :) )

The more things change...

[SumDeusExMachina]

Well, I don't know about some of you people (I heard somewhere that the average age of the Slashdot poster is around 15), but I remeber back in the day when we had to use terminals to use a computer at all. Yup, those were the days allright. Worrying about getting your processes killed for taking up too much CPU time, running up massive bills for computer time, etc.

I thought that we had gotten away from this by the early '90s when PCs became common and powerful enough that you could operate relatively comfortably without the support of some big iron. After all, wasn't the whole big-iron-to-desktop transition about self-empowerment? I thought so, because I didn't have to worry about pissing off some sysop when I compiled my newest Linux kernel on my 386 with 8 megs of RAM.

But now we have this crap about creating X terminals now. Don't we learn anything? We have all immensely enjoyed the personal freedom accorded to us by having enough local processing power to get the job done, no matter how many times the remote server crashes and burns. Besides, I have better ways to allocate my network's bandwidth than with a ton of X packets. Like, say, playing Quake III or browsing the web, or transfering files to my Windows 98 box from my NT server.

Plus, we are confronted with the fact that 486s probably won't have very nice video cards to begin with, so you can pretty much kiss a decent-looking display goodbye.