I'm out looking for a diskless thin client, but it seems like "cheap, small, choose one"... :-)
Basically, I'm tied to this computer pretty much all the time, but my girlfriend, whom I'm living with, needs to get some work done now and then too, so we need another workstation of some sort.
My box is a 1.4 GHz T-bird, so it should have plenty of power to power a thin client, so a thin client is the obvious choice. The good thing is, I've got a diskless Pentium PRO 180 MHz lying around, it would make the perfect thin client! :-) If it hadn't been for the size of our appartment... There is no room for another minitower... :-( Uhm, we're trying to live in here as well, you know! :-)
Just as advice, look for old Dell Desktops. I own one, I think G something, with a 233 CPU, they are even fast enough for Winblows 98 (I don't use it, so I don't matter). Really low noise, onboard NIC (with PXE 0.9, which I didn't get to work, but there's always etherboot floppies). Should be the right thing to pop a 15" monitor (or 17") onto.
The best solution would be to connect another monitor, keyboard and mouse somewhere to the existing box. Ideally, I have a Matrox G450 that are dual-headed, and mouse and keyboard could be connected to an USB port, I guess, so, with some real cleverness, it should be possible to connect everything to the box I have... A pure software thin-client... At least in principle? Or what?
Nope. AFAIK - never done myself - you can have two separate running X servers on one machine, just tell each which graphics card to use, tell the one to use input mouse/kbd ps/2, the other one usb, rock'n'roll.
There were even some people designing thin clients for two stations (two PCI graphics boards in a 486, or so, long ago :-)
Since I've never heard about any such solutions, the next thought is to buy a PCI card where I could connect the monitor, keyboard and mouse. I guess this implies a PCI card with a CPU, GPU and PS/2 interfaces, RAM slots, etc. I've googled quite a lot, and I couldn't find that either. Anybody know if any such thing exist and is reasonably well supported?
Another idea, but are there really things like that? I've seen (and used) a 586-100 on a ISA-board, but that required to have control over the isa bus and was thought for use on a 286 mainboard, *without power connected to the board* and could control even a NIC on the board beside... btw. no idea if it really works on 286, but we had some isa riser card with triple isa slot on it, plugging in cpu card & nic, putting etherboot on it, connect power, nice wooden casing of about 20*20*25cm (8",8",10")...)
Since I haven't found anything that suits me, I found it was time to ask humans, and you folks seems like the right people to ask...
I've of course looked at many small boxes, they cost about $250. I would need a monitor, keyboard and mouse in addition, so I was hoping to get away with about $300 for the whole thing, so it is a bit beyond our budget.
Give it a try with the second graphics adapter. Results would be interesting.
Cheers,
Kjetil
Have a lot of fun!
Anselm
------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SF.net Giveback Program. SourceForge.net hosts over 70,000 Open Source Projects. See the people who have HELPED US provide better services: Click here: http://sourceforge.net/supporters.php _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
