[H-GEN] what to do with old P100, P200?

[Robert Brockway]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
[ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]

On Sun, 28 Jul 2002, Matthew Taylor wrote:

> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
> 
> This is more of a generic question 'what lightweight windows managers 
> could I use to provide acceptable behaviour?'
> 
> I recall being shown something like kvm (Rob Brockway??), I havn't 

Probably not one of mine :)  Now if you'd suggested that I had been 
showing the virtues of fvwm2 I would have believed you ;)

> looked at enlightenment, how 'lightweight' is it? what options are there 
> other than kde / gnome?
> 
> I'd like to turn these into useful standalone machines, that can run 
> netscape6 (for internet banking) and word processing/spreadsheet type 
> apps. Otherwise I'm looking at turning them into ltsp clients.

I highly recomend LTSP [1] over running them standalone.

If you were running the boxes standalone then the capacity of each box
would be quite limited when running quite alot of recently developed
software (even opensource suffers with feeping creaturism :)  A light
weight window manager and apps could be used but the thin client approach
(LTSP) really adds more bang for your buck.

One modern PC with decent power can run many simultaneous graphical
displays.  In all liklihood if you have a local box which is powerful
enough you would barely notice several graphical displays running off it.
I used to run simultanous users on my old 486DX-33 with 32Mb (zen) around
1997 [2].  I was surprised how well it worked actually :)

LTSP can be cool with Openmosix to tie the thin clients into a cluster to
add even more grunt to what appears to the outside to be a single machine.

> the 2 machines I am looking at have <64 meg ram, 1& 4 meg video cards. 
> due to 'spare' (not so old) hard disks being pressed into service, disc 

And with LTSP no need to have a local filesystem on anything but a ram
disk :)  No harddrive.

So I recomend a thin client solution 100% in this case.

[1] http://www.ltsp.org for those who didn't know.

[2] One user on the console, and one on another 486 (with 4Mb) which ran a
cut down Linux install and an Xserver.  This was pre-LTSP.  I also had an
NCD 19r XTerminal in my bedroom and would be logged in there from time to
time also.

Cheers,
	-Rob

-- Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org  ICQ: 104781119
   Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
   avon: up 17 days, 20:20,  3 users,  load average: 0.02, 0.04, 0.00
   "The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah


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