486 Machines

Warren Togami warren at togami.com
Tue Nov 20 21:30:45 PST 2001


On Tue, 2001-11-20 at 18:34, MonMotha wrote:
> 100mbit on a 486?  Doubtful unless they have a PCI bus (which was very 
> rare among 486s).  I've only seen one 100mbit ISA card, made by 3com. 
> However, you could possibly use VNC instead of just straigt up X remote 
> display and get a thin client job accomplished nicely in 10mbit.
> 

I thought that ISA 10mbit would be sufficient for X too, but I have had
far too many X instabilities with all ISA cards that I have tried.  X
would randomly die, an quite frequently.



Yes, VNC is another option that is even lower bandwidth than X, although
it loads the server far more than X.  A virtual framebuffer for VNC is
created on the server for each client.  That's a lot of memory usage
when you add up all the thin clients.  RAM is currently a limited
resource on cheap off-the-shelf Linux servers.  2-3.5GB is the most you
can do.

There is something called "low bandwidth X" that I haven't tried yet. 
This may be a less server memory intensive solution than VNC.

VNC makes it nearly impossible for me to use stuff like VirtualFS to
allow the thin clients to use local floppies, CD-ROM and sound devices. 
You can read about VirtualFS here:
http://www.solucorp.qc.ca/virtualfs/

Fortunately there are a few new Dual Athlon motherboards coming soon
that support up to 8GB RAM.  Very nice, especially with 512MB DDR SDRAM
registered ECC modules for less than $80 at most places.



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