[aclug-L] Cheap X Terminals

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Thanks to Jonathan Hall for pointing me in this direction.

National Computer's outlet store (at Lincoln and Woodlawn) has a bunch 
of X terminals.  For those of you that don't know what they are, X
terminals let you run programs on your Linux box, but display on these 
separate boxes.  They use Ethernet for this usually, but I believe
they can use a serial line for it too.

You can do a lot of neat things with them.  If you're in a company,
they are great for anybody as a workstation, except perhaps if you're
doing heavy-duty animation work or something -- shoving all that down
the Ethernet isn't pretty.  A lot of universities use them for labs.
For home use, it can give you another workstation somewhere else in
the house that runs all the same software as your main computer.  Or,
you can use it as a pseudo-multiheaded display using x2x.

So, what you get is a thin box, all by itself, with no need for any
disk drives (just hook up monitor, keyboard, mouse) that can handle
all your X programs.  This is what people today mean by "thin client"
or "network computers", but Unix had this back in the 80s :-)

National is selling them used for $15 a piece (new ones often run into
the thousands!).  I now own *cough* several :-) They've got 256 color
1024x768 svga output and use standard PS/2 mouse, keyboard, and SLIP
serial, 10baseT (UTP), or 10base2 (coax) ethernet.

The trick is that you need some software on your Linux box that these
things download when they boot.  Fortunately, I have tracked that
software down.  It's about 20 mb of space on your Linux box.

A few caveats: make sure you get the National *outlet* store, not the
normal one (they're almost right next to each other.)  Some of the
guys there don't know about the X terminals, but the manager does.
Also, make sure you get the HP X terminals.  The others don't seem to
be very useful.

John

-- 
John Goerzen   Linux, Unix consulting & programming   jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx |
Developer, Debian GNU/Linux (Free powerful OS upgrade)       www.debian.org |
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