[wplug] looking for old computers

Brian S. Woolstrum woolstrum at cmu.edu
Thu Dec 5 16:52:45 EST 2002


On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Nick Iglehart wrote:

>
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> Yes they are served from another machine but the runtime elements are
> still started on the local machine.  Everything that is immediately
> necessary in any arbitrary situation is loaded into RAM on the thin
> client.   Otherwise, every click would have to be transmitted,
> processed and redrawn across the net, which is slow for obvious

Transmitting mouse and keyboard clicks across the network
is how X works.

> reasons.  The only thin client implementation that I am aware of that
> handles things that way is the Sun Ray, which compensates in other
> ways.
>
> This is why RAM is important in a diskless client.  If everything was
> handled on a server then you would only need the bare minimum amount
> to handle kernel and device space.  To run an X client you also have
> to load that into RAM.  It does run lighter since many elements are
> kept on the server and handled there.
>

Are you really talking X client here or X server? Because
the X client is really the application software (such as
gimp) running on the machine that we would normally
consider to be the server machine.  The X server is the
program running on the machine that would be thought of as
the client machine, because that program is serving the mouse,
keyboard and display to the X client application.


http://www.x.org/X11_clientdesign.htm

explains this a lot better than I can





> - -----Original Message-----
> From: wplug-admin at wplug.org [mailto:wplug-admin at wplug.org] On Behalf
> Of Eric C. Cooper
> Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2002 10:23 AM
> To: wplug at wplug.org
> Subject: Re: [wplug] looking for old computers
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 09:49:53AM -0500, Nick Iglehart wrote:
> > If you use anything slower than a 233 or so I would recommend
> > installing blackbox or some other lightweight window manager.
> > Gnome  and KDE just don't have much oomph on a 486.
>
> The LTSP approach that the OP plans on deploying uses the older
> machines as pure X Terminals.  The window managers, desktop
> environments, and applications all run on servers with more
> horsepower.
>
> - --
> Eric C. Cooper          e c c @ c m u . e d u
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