I don't think there are that many 286s or 386s left in schools. Using older machines as terminals has a few technical issues.
1. Best to use a decent resolution eg 1024 x 768 in 16 bit colour. This > requires 2 meg of video ram and its often difficult to upgrade pre Pentium machines.
It's usually the monitor that goes with the old machine which won't do that resolution, or is suffiently fuzzy to make 1024 pixels look interesting.
2. If you want to use etherboot you have to have a bios that will boot from a network. Some early ones don't although some can be flashed to update them.
Now you do, but not quite true. I remember very old 286's (discless stations) from RM, which used proms on network cards to remote boot from a Novell server. I don't remember Network boot BIOS settings, however my memory be be faulty; this was 1990.
For these reasons I think its best to use pentiums as the lowest spec for > terminals unless you already have a supply of machines you know will work.
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On Friday 06 September 2002 18:37, Grainge, Derek wrote:
I don't think there are that many 286s or 386s left in schools. Using older machines as terminals has a few technical issues.
1. Best to use a decent resolution eg 1024 x 768 in 16 bit colour. This
requires 2 meg of video ram and its often difficult to upgrade pre Pentium machines.
It's usually the monitor that goes with the old machine which won't do that resolution, or is suffiently fuzzy to make 1024 pixels look interesting.
Buy a second hand one, or even a new one that supports XGA, there are shed loads about. Some schools have even saved the money from buying the base unit for a nice LCD monitor and it makes no significant difference to the performance and the users perception of the machine is the look and feel. ie new keyboard, LCD and mouse gives a very impressive terminal at under £300. I prefer to try and make my users think they are getting a better deal with Linux rather than a make-shift poor relation deal :-)
2. If you want to use etherboot you have to have a bios that will boot from a network. Some early ones don't although some can be flashed to update them.
Now you do, but not quite true. I remember very old 286's (discless stations) from RM, which used proms on network cards to remote boot from a Novell server. I don't remember Network boot BIOS settings, however my memory be be faulty; this was 1990.
Thing is you then need to do something with the software to make this work and IMHO it just isn't worth the hassle when you can get P133s for nothing anyway. How about a Psion series 7 as a portable Linux thin client? Regards, -- IanL
participants (2)
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Grainge, Derek -
Ian Lynch