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Linux-Based Thin X-Terminals?

Posted by Cliff on from the the-smaller-the-better dept.

Yet Another Anonymous Coward asks: "How easy is it to set up Linux boxes as thin clients? My boss wants to use some old 486 boxes as X terminals, networked to a largish server where all applications are run. Has anyone tried this? What is the minimum software that needs to be installed on the X terminal systems? My boss likes open source software because it saves money; Is this another way he can save money?" Obviously the use of older machines is going to ease the costs of putting PCs on employee's desks, but are there other advantages (or disadvantages) to a setup like this?

2 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. It works nicely by Spiv · · Score: 3

    I'm sysadmin at a residential college in Australia, and we've got a couple of low-end pentiums set up as thin X-terminals. They work quite well. The performance is perfectly usable.

    Basically all you need to do is a minimal install of your favourite distro (we use Slackware). Make sure you've got X and networking, and that's all you need. You don't even need any X apps... so it doesn't take very much space on a disk.

    Then just configure it to use runlevel 4. A line like this in your rc.4 file works nicely: exec /usr/X11R6/bin/X -query myserver.mydomain

    A quick peek at one of our boxes revealed it only uses 60Mb of disk space... and we haven't gone to any effort at all to trim it. Of course, it helps to use Slackware and not Redhat ;)

    If you really want to save on client disk space, you can always install a kernel that mounts its root fs over NFS. You still need a little bit of disk space though, for swap - unless your 486s have plenty of RAM. X tends to be a little RAM hungry, as we all know.

    And seeing as the CPU is going to be idle a lot of the time, you can always install an RC5 cracker or Seti@Home if you like :) Andrew.

  2. Done that - it's easy by gwolf · · Score: 3

    I have two possible solutions for you. Which one you will choose will depend on how your workplace is set up.

    The first solution is to set up a full X server on a floppy-based Linux distribution - you can take a look at muLinux (http://mulinux.nevalabs.org). This solution requires 16MB RAM, in order to expand X to a RAM disk. muLinux is extremely loaded, given that it fits into one, two, three or four floppies (depending on your needs - I think you will stick with two).

    A much lighter solution would be to use a smaller and more specialized distribution, such as LODS (Linux One Disk Svncviewer, http://home.rochester.rr.com/specht/lods/ ) - It has nothing but the minimum necessary to boot and fire svncviewer, a simple bash with the most basic commands, an editor to modify it... And, I think, that's about it. LODS is based on another minidistribution, Hal91 (http://home.sol.no/~okolaas/hal91/hal9 1.html), and is fairly easy to configure and modify. In fact, if you are interested, I can send you the images I use at my workplace - it just boots and fires svncviewer, which connects to your vncserver and looks just like X. Users may even think it is a diskless terminal, takes not more than two minutes to load... and, basically, works great :)

    I use it on 486/33 machines with 16MB, though I'm sure it will fit on 8MB RAM. Mail me if you need more info.