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John Andersen said the following on 05/14/2013 01:50 PM:
On 5/14/2013 10:19 AM, Anton Aylward wrote:
After all, X is not Windows. The reality is you can make a graphics card that does most of what X requires since all X is is the display. The computation is done on the computer, not on the display.
True, but X (even the lightweight versions) is a bandwidth hog.
I'd be leery of doing that on any scale over a wide area network, (I've done it, and it sucks). Its ok on a campus network, but its sucking way more bandwidth than having your own Linux installation on a local machine with files hosted on a network file server.
Same problem with Windows Terminal server. Doesn't scale well over long distances.
First: What do you mean by 'scale'? The LTSP discuses this. Second: plugging more cards into a chassis doesn't scale well over distance either, unless you have a dedicated rack, in which case we're back to the CITRIX situation, and even then there are still regular PCs at the client end. Contemporary to the X-Terminals of the 80s/90s was stuff like LanTastic and NOVEL LAN. In many ways they were pretty amazing. I saw one LanTastic setup that was using something that seemed barely ahead of a sting and tin cans. Strangely they used pretty thin clients, MS-DOS and early MS-Windows, but it seemed that instead of just remote home folders they downloaded the binaries over the LAN as well. Perhaps my memory has slipped. I do recall reading that as LAN protocols went they were very efficient, but as Mike Padlipsky pointed out in 'Elements of Programming Style', they are not scalable - they are not routable. TCP/IP carries a bit of an overhead by comparison but it is routable - which means it can work over long distances. The scale-by-volume is a separate problem and there have bee efforts to address that for X. Many end up as VNC, which gets back to the CITRIX model: you have a display mechanism on the server and remote emulation of the mouse and keyboard. It may not be a real display in that there is a graphics card on the server dedicated to the channel; we know about framebuffers :-) BUT it does get back to the "how thin do you want it to be" remote client that is the display in front of the end use, the one he or she is looking at and laying hands on the keyboard and mouse. Which gets back to my point about Landfill and Salvation Army Specials. Yes you can load it up with a nice fast graphics card, but if that is faster than your comms channel its a waste. -- "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end ofthe western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org