[Gllug] X terminal or diskless workstation - views?

[John Hearns]

On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 14:26, Peter Childs wrote:

>     I'm not too sure at the difference between the two options, they 
> seam the same to me. ie a X terminal would be a diskless workstation, to 
> do anything your going to need to load stuff off your server, 
Your point is taken, and from your reply you do understand the
difference. For the 'younger set' though, it might be worth explaining
what the difference is.

In the 'old days' when Unix workstations cost many $$$$$ it was common
to have dedicated devices called X-terminals.
these were dedicated computers, not as powerful as a graphics
workstation, but which had full size screens, keyboards mice and an
Ethernet connector. They booted via the network from the server,
and run the X protocol only. So its like having a remote terminal,
running X.
for instance, as St. Thomas they had a therapy planning system running
on HP workstations. As part of the network, there were several HP
X-terms for the clinicians to use. If I'm not wrong they had 2M of
memory, which made them much cheaper than the thousands of pounds an HP
workstation cost.
One of the beauties of Linux now is with the LTSP project you can
recycle old, less powerful PCs as zero cost X-terminals.


A diskless workstation is something different.
Its sometimes used  in Beowulf clusters, though we don't and use
the hard disk on the nodes.
The nodes boot up, normally via the network or maybe off a CF or USB
stick.
They run Linux entirely in a RAM disk.




> (applications) by loading the apps on the server thouse using shared 
> librarys do not have to load the librarys more than once so you save on 
> memory. If you load the apps locally you have to send the entire apps 
> over the network to load them into the clients memory that can bog down 
> your network. In short its an argument of bogging down your network in 
> traffic and your server in disk transactions and bogging down your 
> server when it has 3 copies of openoffice or the like loaded.
>     I asume your using ltsp (or www.ltsp.org) I've got 30 thin clients 
> network booting with sound and able to run sound, local applications and 
> currently have about 50% plugged in they all run fine on a 100Mbs Network,
>     Sound uses nasd currently although there are other options.
>     I would surgest you look at the ltsp web site (linux terminal server 
> project)
> 
> Peter Childs

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