To what extent is this possible? Without the hassle of EPROMS and boot roms in the ethernet card - lets say that there is a small local hard drive. How do you get the kernel to load - or MUST that load from the local drive? Can most of the rest be remote - including swap files, and the rest of the root structure. Are there special permissions required on files/directories for all this to operate. Its just that Linux like everything else does seem to require an increasing amount of hard disc and the possibility of using older slower machines as Xserver clients would be undermined if the 540MB limit on some old motherboards - not to mention to 210MB hard drive thats there. Of course there might be a fair amount of paging with limited RAM. Do you really need 16MB as a minimum to run LINUX as an Xserver client only? (How did they ever manage UNIX on mahines with 4MB or less?) Alan Davies Head of Computing Birkenhead School
To what extent is this possible?
We have about 45 discless X clients running now.
Without the hassle of EPROMS and boot roms in the ethernet card - lets say that there is a small local hard drive.
Much better the EPROMS, we don't have the hassle of the local hard drive. I am sure it could be done with a local hard drive instead.
How do you get the kernel to load - or MUST that load from the local drive?
No, our kernel loads from the server.
Can most of the rest be remote - including swap files, and the rest of the root structure.
Yes. We have a directory /scratch/discless_swap within which are all the swap files.
Are there special permissions required on files/directories for all this to operate.
Yes, cos the swap files must be writeable, that's one reason why they are all in /scratch.
Its just that Linux like everything else does seem to require an increasing amount of hard disc and the possibility of using older slower machines as Xserver clients would be undermined if the 540MB limit on some old motherboards - not to mention to 210MB hard drive thats there.
The main limitation we find with old 486's is the video capability is not up to modern expectations and ISA video cards don't seem easy to obtain. We try for 1024 by 768 by 8-bit colour, and this is not always possible. The cost of the final system is heavily dependent on the cost of the monitor.
Of course there might be a fair amount of paging with limited RAM. Do you really need 16MB as a minimum to run LINUX as an Xserver client only? (How did they ever manage UNIX on mahines with 4MB or less?)
No, but you need eight as a minimum. And the X people have their nomenclature upside down so it's the "server" that's running on the client. The other server then runs all the software centrally, so client RAM (where the "server" is running) doesn't need to do much. Currently our machines have between 8 & 16MB of real RAM and all the swap files are 16MB, but they do get used a bit so we'll probably increase this when we next get round to it. Our central server is currently a 256MB Athlon 500 but this is not powerful enough for class use: it needs at least 512MB and probably 1GB to handle a class of sixteen using StarOffice. It is quite powerful enough for the asynchronous access it gets at present - the X terminals are scattered around the school. But I can bring it to its knees with a class all loading StarOffice at the same time (load averages on "top" like 50 40 30!). Ours is all FreeBSD, not Linux, but the same principles apply. The main problem is that you need a guru (not myself) to set it up. You can then access the same X resource using VNC on all your other machines, thus establishing a common platform whatever your hardware. -- Christopher Dawkins, Felsted School, Dunmow, Essex CM6 3JG 01371-820527 or 07798 636725 cchd@felsted.essex.sch.uk
I think Christopher has answered this fairly fully already, but yes, you certainly can use a disk (hard or floppy) to boot, but the disk like the boot rom tells it to get its kernel off the server across the network. I've done this in the past experimentally, but not on a `production' basis. On Thu, 9 Mar 2000, Alan Davies wrote:
To what extent is this possible?
Without the hassle of EPROMS and boot roms in the ethernet card - lets say that there is a small local hard drive.
How do you get the kernel to load - or MUST that load from the local drive?
Can most of the rest be remote - including swap files, and the rest of the root structure.
Are there special permissions required on files/directories for all this to operate.
Its just that Linux like everything else does seem to require an increasing amount of hard disc and the possibility of using older slower machines as Xserver clients would be undermined if the 540MB limit on some old motherboards - not to mention to 210MB hard drive thats there.
Of course there might be a fair amount of paging with limited RAM. Do you really need 16MB as a minimum to run LINUX as an Xserver client only? (How did they ever manage UNIX on mahines with 4MB or less?)
Alan Davies Head of Computing Birkenhead School
-- Roger Whittaker SuSE Linux Ltd The Kinetic Centre Theobald Street Borehamwood Herts WD6 4PJ ---------------------- 020 8387 1482 ---------------------- roger@suse-linux.co.uk ----------------------
participants (3)
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Alan Davies -
Christopher Dawkins -
Roger Whittaker