Dave Sherman wrote:
> 
> At 12:43 PM 04/23/2001 -0500, you wrote:
> >I run our entire office of 35+ users off a 330Mhz sparc/512MB with
> >Solaris and a dual 800 Mhz pentium III/512MB with Linux.  We run Autocad,
> >StarOffice, Netscape, and an inventory control/sales analysis/accounting
> >package which is a mix of gnome / text applications (the text apps are
> >being ported to gnome when I have the odd moment free from reading this
> >list).
> >
> >I do about 2 hours of admin / week, and we haven't had any downtime since
> >we switched to Linux (no nines, just a one and zero's...).
> >
> >We bought 35 neoware X-Terminals in 1994 for use with SCO Unix.  We have had
> >0 terminal failures in a little more than 6 years of continuous use.  They
> >run gnome
> >and autocad perfectly, neither of which existed when the terminals were built.
> 
> Are these terminals ethernet or serial-based? I've been thinking about this
> (an ethernet-based solution, using some older 486 and low-end Pentium PCs
> with no hard drives as "thin clients") for a while myself, for my home, but
> never really researched the idea -- I knew it was possible, just not
> exactly how.
>
Ethernet based.

It's pretty easy to build an X-terminal.  I've used all-in-one mainboads with
32Mb of RAM and a 300Mhz Cyrix processor.  I used to pick up 10Mb Trendware
ethernet cards 'cause it was easy to burn a ROM with a netboot image, but the
latest trendware cards don't work.  It might make more sense to buy a $10 floppy
drive and internally mount it with a boot loader floppy inserted.

Once you have the hardware setup you need to build a kernel that supports the
hardware and load it over the net.  You need to setup a ramdisk that supports
the utilities you need to boot with.  After that you can either NFS mount a
root filesystem or load in a pre-rolled ramdisk image.  Depends on what you
need.

It's pretty straightforward.  I did most of this as a fallback source of
X-terminals about 3 years ago.  At that time the LTSP group was pretty 
incomprehensible.  It's probably worth your time to check what they have
to offer now.

Kent