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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