: I work for a business which installs and maintains computer systems. : On one site in particular, our client has quite a few dumb terminals : (AXEL AX3000) in use. Apparantly, they support graphical VNC : sessions, as well as the text sessions which our system uses. : : This client has just signed up for broadband Internet access, and : would like me to come up with some way for those of his staff without : PCs to use the Internet. Conveniently, he has a server which is only : a few years old, which we have just replaced. I was thinking of : installing Linux on the (otherwise redundant) server and running VNC : on it.
That sounds like a viable method. : 1. Is is possible for the VNC server to provide, say, just Mozilla to : VNC clients (with no desktop environment like KDE or GNOME). If so, how : complicated is this to configure? I'm pretty new to Linux. You can arrange to run only mozilla for clients, but I have run into some problems doing it completely without a window manager; X apps in linux expect some of the keyboard focus and miscelaneous functions to be done by a window manager. But even so, you can run a very simple window manager, and only run mozilla; I've used twm for this purpose, but others might be even less intrusive (though twm can be configured to be quite un-noticable). It's not terribly complicated, but it would involve some scripting in shell or perl, most likely. And writing a twm config file (twm being quite old, and being configured by text file only). There are howto pages on the web, showing how to arrange for VNC services to be brought up on boot, both with login and without;for your case, you'd probably want to configure it so that a VNC session and a web browser was brought up at boot time for each client that can connect, and configure each AX3000 to connect to a specific VNC session. The basic method would be to add to the /etc/rc.init scripts a series of Xvnc commands, with corresponding web browser and window manager commands. So. Quite a few fiddly details to handle, based on just what you want to appear at the user's terminal, but it's all very do-able, and only arcane or obscure to configure, not difficult. Note that if you didn't have the server and AX3000 clients available anyways, you could get a small boxes (eg, mini-itx, or micro-atx based systems) running mozilla on linux for a bit more than $200 (plus monitor) per seat for the hardware. This wouldn't require the server. Something to keep in mind for the future, perhaps. : 2. How hard is it to get decent performance from such a system? Will the : additional network traffic slow down existing traffic? Performance of VNC over a lan can be quite snappy. There may be a noticeable latency for screen updates, but depending on how fast the AX3000 runs the VNC client, it can be almost invisibly fast, and appear like you are simply running on the server. I'd expect most visible signs of slowness to be caused by delays fetching web pages, not the VNC display process. This is not guaranteed, though; if the AX3000 is a bit slow, or if there's more latency than normal in a lan, or if the server is too heavily loaded, then there can be performance issues. But I would not expect horrid performance; I'd expect fairly good performance. : Please ask me about anything else which might be relevant. Most important is how many clients would connect simultaneously, and how much memory does the server have. But for *some* number of terminals, such a scheme should be viable. Maybe... just a vague estimate... up to 5 clients in a half-gigabyte to a gigabyte machine (though that'd be starting to get cramped, what with an Xvnc process and a mozilla or firefox browser process per client). Wayne Throop [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ VNC-List mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To remove yourself from the list visit: http://www.realvnc.com/mailman/listinfo/vnc-list
