[H-GEN] Diskless boxes for internet access

[Robert Brockway]

On Fri, 9 Jan 1998, Steve Pinel wrote:

> Also, anyone know about the 8Mb RAM and X/Netscape issue?  Will it be
> adequate?  Is anyone buying any more 4Mb 30 pin RAM modules, as has been
> happening for some time now?

Linux/X/Netscape in 8mb could grind a bit, but there are ways to reduce
this.  Give the boxen a lean kernel and don't allow them to run any
uneccessary apps ro daemons.  Also, take out all the virtual terminals
with text logins (excepy maybe one) as apparently they take up about 900k
each.

One alternative that comes to mind is QNX.  It is commercial but I'd be
surprised if they didn't give a school a good deal.  QNX could be
described as a nano-kernel real-time Unix like OS.  Dependable (it runs
alot of the world's nuclear reactors) and light.  Its GUI, photon is also
light, and has all those cool X features (network transparency,etc) that
we love.  I believe they have there own full featured web browser
included.  Given that you are getting _alot_ of copies, the cost might be
prohibitive.  Perhaps you could become a beta tester for QNX :)

Hmm...Another option just occured to me...

You could setup each of the 386 boxen as xterms as you know, and then
display Netscape from a central server.  This won't be as bad on the
server as it might first sound.  Linux uses 'copy on write' for its memory
pages.  So, one app (Netscape in this case) being run many times will
largely use the same memory for each process.  A server with 32mb or
preferably 64mb and reasonable grunt could easily handle many xterminals.

I turned an 8mb 486 into a pretty nice X terminal during my inductry
project last year.  I am a power user, and it kept up with me no problem
(after all the xterminal is really doing very little :)

You could even allow a few other X apps to the kids and make the boxen
multi-purpose.

The bits for the server could be picked up pretty cheaply these days.
Cheers,
	-Robert

--Robert Brockway B.Sc.  Email: robert at zen.humbug.org.au, robert at icc.net.au
				r.brockway at mailbox.uq.edu.au
                         WWW:   http://www.humbug.org.au/~robert
                         President of HUMBUG (http://www.humbug.org.au)

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