Re: Cheap hardware X-terms?

[Ray Olszewski <ray@comarre.com>]

At 03:28 PM 9/21/99 -0400, Doug Loss wrote:

>> 
>I'm sure you're right about a local load of the OS and X-server, Ray. 
>Do you set these X-terms up to use DHCP to get their network settings? 
>If so, I'd think you could come up with a standard install that would
>work on every machine with no need for local configuration.  If one gets
>screwed up, just drop another in its place and rerun the generic install
>on the bad one once its problem (I'm thinking hardware here) gets
>resolved.

I've only been doing one-at-a-time experiments, so I haven't used DHCP ...
but that's the right way to scale the effort up for a real deployment, as
Harry McGregor just noted in his comment on this message. 

Ideally, you'd want an installer that fits on a floppy, boots, then accesses
a server to get the rest of what it needs for a full install. Not hard to do
in concept -- the rub it that if all the systems aren't standardized (they
aren't likely to be if we're talking about salvaging used, donated
euqipment), the installer has to be able to deal with different video cards
(hence different X servers), different monitors, different NICs and settings
(IRQ and i/o base), and varying amounts of hard disk space. 

Unless you can assume a standard hardware configuration, this soon starts to
turn into an installation problem as complex as any standard Linux install
(less stuff to install, yes, but the installer needs a lot of flexibility).
The possibilities here are intriguing, though ... perhaps those others on
the list who have done large-scale deployments of Linux-based XTerminals can
comment?

------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA           	 	         ray@comarre.com        
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