[seul-edu] [Fwd: 286 PCs for SEUL]

[Doug Loss <dloss@suscom.net>]

Here's a response to the request for suggestions on using old 286 machines that
appeared in the last Linux in education report:

Ian wrote:

> >Jay Drew asked an interesting question:
> I have a lab full of old but good IBM PS/2 286 workstations that will soon be
> gracing a local landfill. Has anyone tried using these as LINUX terminals? Will
> they handle running as X-terminals? I hate to see working computers >thrown
> away.
> >We tossed around a number of possibilities for these
>
> Here's an idea for you. On PCs too old to run Linux, run FreeDOS instead. With
> a TCP/IP stack and the VNC client for DOS, you can get a GUI login to an X
> Session on a fast server elsewhere on the LAN. This places very low demands on
> the client (screen resolution/depth and ethernet are about it). You'd get
> something like Windows Terminal Server, and workstations would boot in just a
> few seconds.
>
> One problem with VNC is that all apps run on the server you've connected to.
> VNC does nothing but read the keyboard/mouse and update the screen so the
> client CPU is mostly unused (except for some of the compression codecs).
> Load-balancing the VNC daemon across N servers would allow this kind of thing
> to scale. You wouldn't want 80 students all logged into 1 hapless 233 MHz
> Pentium II (all of them probably launching a browser).
>
> There are lots of pros, cons, and side-effects with this setup, but it would
> allow you to get useful life out of 286 PCs. The lighter version of this is use
> FreeDOS on the 286 with a good terminal emulator/telnet app, then load the
> server with lightweight, full-screen apps (s-lang/ncurses). But it would
> definately look "antique" to today's kids.

--
Doug Loss                 God is a comedian playing
Data Network Coordinator  to an audience too afraid
Bloomsburg University     to laugh.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Voltaire