From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Mar 27 20:02:15 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id UAA17186 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 20:02:15 -0800 (PST) Received: from obiwan.aceonline.com.au (obiwan.aceonline.com.au [203.103.90.67]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id UAA17178 for ; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 20:02:04 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (adrian@localhost) by obiwan.aceonline.com.au (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id LAA00427; Fri, 28 Mar 1997 11:50:54 +0800 (WST) Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 11:50:54 +0800 (WST) From: Adrian Chadd To: Joe Greco cc: Chris Coleman , hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Small Disk Xterminal In-Reply-To: <199703271630.KAA17000@solaria.sol.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, Joe Greco wrote: > > I have about 5 Hewlett Packard 486 DX66 Computers with 80 meg Hard drives. > > I want to set them up as xterminals to run programs off of a larger > > FreeBSD Server. I tried looking in the archives and found some discussion > > on this topic. But I was unable to discover how this was resolved. > > Woooohoooooo!! > > It sounds like you might like something I've been playing with for quite > some time now. > Same. :) > I have a not-very-polished set of tools that allows me to build a floppy > disk (1.44MB) that contains a minimal (MINIMAL) FreeBSD configuration on > an MFS filesystem. This is potentially very handy for things like small > routers, terminal servers, etc. It is ALSO useful to build a minimal > Xterminal (although the Xterminal requires an -ro NFS mount from > someplace). > Why? What other programs would the straight X server need? Could you fit them compressed onto a 1.44mb floppy? I was thinking of booting off a floppy disk, and "netbooting" (kinda), by getting what was needed, placing it into a minimal ramdisk on the machine, and then running totally diskless. > for swap (or swap plus boot). It would not be too hard to do. > Swap? Yes, RAM is so relatively cheap you wouldn't really have problems with it. I know of xterms with 4 and 8mb RAM that run just fine when netbooted. > If anyone is interested in seeing what I did, please let me know and > I'll pack it up. > Please do (to adrian@deathstar.ml.org). > ... JG > I've also been thinking about the diskless station idea. Cool, please send me what you've done. Cya. -- Adrian Chadd | UNIX, MS-DOS and Windows ... | (also known as the Good, the bad and the | ugly..)