OT: Thin Clients

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fairlight" <fairlite at fairlite.com>
To: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 6:49 PM
Subject: Re: OT: Thin Clients


> The honourable and venerable Brian K. White spoke thus:
>> >
>> > What, PuTTY doesn't require the GUI?  News to me.
>>
>> Then consider yourself enlightened, now you know.
>
> You'll go on 10-20 paragraphs about esoteric BS that doesn't matter most
> times you answer in almost every thread you touch.  Now you leave out
> critical information on -how- the program actually runs in non-GUI mode on
> Windows, giving as little information as possible and being a wiseass in
> the process when prompted.
>
> Fine, I'll look it up.  A modicum of consistency would be nice, though.
> Wait, I suppose I have that...you're speaking English in all posts.
> Nevermind.

Did I just hear Mark L. complain about someone posting large amounts of crap 
no one cares about?
If it weren't for you I wouldn't even know the _names_ of any pc games, let 
alone such pressing matters as which video card manufacturers have buggy 
support for some game and which game producers support windows 2000...ugh!

It doesn't require _Windows_, let alone it's gui.

Just for the record, I didn't say that I would use putty in X on linux for a 
thin client though.
If I needed it so thin that stripped down windows was too fat, (which can be 
really pretty thin) and if for some reason I didn't want a nice desktop, 
then it's possible to run putty and a stripped down x server, sans desktop 
environment and windo manager even, but that would be about the ridiculously 
last way I'd go. Just to get sco-ansi? I'd just take the 5 minutes it takes 
to put linux terminal recognition on the sco box and use the linux console 
directly.

Or, as I have in the past, put msdos kermit & freedos on a single floppy. 
There's even still room for a text editor and enough OS cmmands (fdisk, 
format, copy) to make it self contained where it can admin it's own startup 
& config files and copy itself. Thanks to kermits configureability and 
scriptability it's actually handier and more useful than a linux console. 
Kind of hard to duplicate that with a linux kernel and c-kermit on a single 
floppy. Then again, I guess it wouldn't be cheating to use and older linux, 
not even as old as msdos kermit is, _then_ it can all fit, ala "tomsrtbt"
I may have been lucky though that dos ndis drivers existed for the old nics 
involved. Who knows if current nics have any form of dos driver. So, back to 
linux or freebsd.

Speaking of freebsd, I have played with ThinBSD. It's pretty cool. He has 
this stripped down freebsd system that all fits in a 64M pxe boot image and 
ram disk. You can pass it client-specific configs via special dhcp options 
you put in the dhcp server config file.

But really, I don't see why it needs to be quite that thin today. A small 
but still relatively gui-rich linux desktop, something like a 
damn-small-linux at 50 megs, all the way up to a full ubuntu live cd, either 
of which could include putty, would be fine. Or, your typical windows based 
thin client. They are actually arguably the most useful. Just for _starters_ 
you could include anziowin and get printer support for every printer. Thats 
a pretty huge thing to choose to live without if you are at a point where 
you can decide to have it or live without it.

Brian K. White    brian at aljex.com    http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR
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