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Hardware

Cheap Homemade X-Terminals? 24

Posted by Cliff from the for-the-budget-shopper-in-you dept.
aoechsli asks: "I am in the process of setting up a computer learning center for K - 12 age students. The system will be based on a network of about 10 - 15 X-terminals all running off of a server (duh). I will be running Red Hat with KDE2 (when it comes out). It will be used for office aps (Koffice) and Web browsing (Konquerer). What I need help with is trying to find an inexpensive set-up for the X-terminals. I have abandoned the donated hardware route as the set-up of each for individual machine proves to be overwhelming with my limited time constraints. I may be able to secure some funding, and if that comes through, I would like to use a standardized set-up with all of the terminals. I am looking for a small footprint, low power set-up. My proposed solution would be to make an X-terminal with a single board computer and a flat panel display (the 10" LCD seems adequate after seeing the I-Opener.) What flat panel displays are supported? I thought about using flash memory for the boot image, but thought that a smaller HD would be more appropriate. Does anyone have any suggestions on what would be optimal and inexpensive? I am looking to spend no more than $350 on each unit."
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Cheap Homemade X-Terminals? More

Cheap Homemade X-Terminals?

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  • multia/udb machines (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i would definitely look into buying a load of dec multia's. 50-99 bucks for the box, includes 10baseT ethernet, on-board TGA video, on board NCR SCSI, and depending on who sells it to you, maybe a floppy drive and an external adapter for the SCSI interface. the really nice thing about these machines (other than the price) is the firmware. can boot off of the network VERY easily. i would avoid having a local hard drive, that would cut down on the price a LOT. as for local filesystems, buy a decent amount of ram, and create a ramdisk for /var and /tmp and whatnot. i would also run debian linux instead of redhat, i've heard about a lot of people having problems with redhat on an alpha-based system (my personal favorite is slackware but it has not been ported to the alpha).

    costs:
    udb/multia ~ 50-99
    64mb ram ~ 100
    monitor ~ 100
    total: 250-350

    gotchas/catches:

    the machines do not appreciate running with a dead cmos battery, and they commonly ship with one. buy the same type of battery that the apple quadra uses (found at any big hardware store or mac store)

    the machine requires true parity ram

    the video card can only put out 256 colors, but will happily drive a monitor at 1280x1024

    take a look at http://www.alphalinux.org/

    hope this helps.

    -E
  • I've been investigating this a lot, and from what I can tell, the only way to get an LCD screen for under a thousand bucks is to buy an old low-powered laptop.

    I would love to know of another source of 800x600 passive-matrix LCD screens, but as far as I can tell, laptops are it.

    If you look around, you can find P90 laptops for around $400, not including network or CDROM.

  • You're going to have a heck of a time bringing up X on that terminal -- trust me on this one.

    Yes, but it may just be difficult, not impossible. I've seen someone running the Xggi server with the aalib ASCII art driver in a Linux console. The only problem is whether or not a VT100 can handle the screen updates fast enough. For a text terminal, though, they're great. I used to use one many years ago. Just connect it witha serial cable, spawn a getty to the right port and away you go.

  • We use Maxspeed [maxspeed.com] stations at work. They're not too bad. They turn on instantly, and you can run at least 4 off a decent Linux system without problems. You just install a proprietary serial card in the server and hang the clients off the server. Then install Red Hat on the server and add the Maxspeed package on top of it. One problem is that the server needs to be in the same room as the clients pretty much. I'm guessing the boxes cost about $400 apiece. (No prices on the web page.) You can just add an old 15" SVGA monitor for another $50 or less.
  • Uhm... "geek", VT 100's are text only. So I'd venture to say that, no, no one has gone down that road before.

    --

  • Personnally, I would not use laptop for the following reasons :

    • When they break, part are expensive;
    • Most use non-standard video chipset, meaning possible headache configuring X on these machine;
    • Price/performance ratio lower than desktop box(not really revelant for X-term);
    • Their keyboard are'nt exactly ergonomic;
    • Older LCD are'nt comfortable to work on. Ten inches viewable, come on !

    I never completed a similar project, but I would definitely do it with second-hand PC if I had to. A nice place to buy older hardware is IT Xchange [itxchange.com]. They are a bit pricey, but the inventory is large. Personnally, I'll buy a batch of identical machine to ease maintenance. I'll definitely buy brand new monitor however (for picture quality and reliability).

    Another option would be older Sun hardware (SS2, SS5). However, these suffer from some of the same problem as laptop (expensive part, price/performance ratio, etc.). But if you insist on exotic hardware, you could get these cheap on Ebay.

    Have you given a tought about the network? X is a network hog, so it would be worth considering network capacity. IMHO, switched 10baseT sould be enough, and I'll choose that over shared 100baseT anytime.

    Also, you should give the Linux based diskless X terminal toolkit [solucorp.qc.ca] a look.

    Just my 2 bit ...

  • Don't be so quick to reject the "donated hardware" approach. An old Pentium PC with a default kernel and a $30 Tulip-based 10/100 managed NIC isn't going to need much special configuration. The XF86_SVGA package should be compatible at 800x600 or even 1024x768 on nearly any hardware you throw at it, even if it won't necessarily be "optimal".

    Let's imagine you're using RedHat or Mandrake, for the sake of keeping this explanation simple, though similar things can be done with Debian-based distros, too. Once you've got the right assortment of packages loaded and have removed the ones you don't want, you can make a kickstart install floppy, which will allow for a hands-free install (put in floppy, put in CD, and power on).

    If you're okay at making your own RPMs, you can make an extra RPM with your configs (for example, configuring the eth0 interface to configure itself via DHCP, and activating NIS or pam_ldap to participate in centralized configuration). Burn that onto your otherwise-ordinary CD.

    With a bit of planning, unless you have some weird and eccentric systems in the mix, the only substantial thing you'll likely have to do manually is run Xconfigurator, since every monitor and video card dot-clock is possibly different.

    The hell with KDE2 anbd KOffice. It's not going to be finished and stable for months, nice as it'll be. Same goes for GNOME, which is imprioving but just not stable enough yet. Go with KDE 1.1.2. It's extremely stable and a fairly seamless end-user environment. For office software, go with StarOffice 5.1a. It's cost-free, full-featured, easy to learn, and there are good books on it available at any bookstore.

    The thing about this is that both KDE and StarOffice (or for that matter, Corel Office) are very resoure-hungry. You will need a server (or more than one server) with a whole lot of RAM (assume at least 32MB for each connected user) and, (guessing off the top of my head), 70-100MHz of processing power for each.

    If you want to be able to scale down the server, you may want to look into a leaner (but less capable) desktop environment, and Applixware, which is a leaner (but not free) office suite.

    Why do they need an entire office suite, anyway? Will something like LyX/KLyX for documents and Gnumeric for spreadsheets do what the kids need?

    $350 with displays is really pushing things. It can be done, but isn't your time worth something? The iOpener is cheap not because a computer can be made for $99, but because it's being sold at a loss with the expectation of people paying for monthly service.
  • The below is what i use in /etc/inittab for my DEC VT320

    s3:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty ttyS3 19200 vt220-w
    -LW
  • You should definetly look into thin clients. No HDD required, no setup required. I've got an IBM Network Station, you can just plug it into the power, plug in a kbd/mouse/monitor, plug it into the ethernet and poweron. It'll tftp/hdcp/bootp itself up and let you logon to any host running XDM. There's even a mini-HOWTO on getting them up with Linux as a server.

    Still need to get monitors though. And I have no idea how much these things cost.


    --
  • I actually recently came into ownership of an honest-to-goodness Digital VT 100 terminal. (stop drooling, geek!) and hope to set it up as an X-term for my home linux server (when I get that running, mind you). Anyone gone down that road before?
  • Sorry, I posted before coffee. Bad Idea. What I meant to get across was that I wanted the VT100 to serve as a CLI into my linux box; a telnet window (VT100 emulation suck my dust!) etc. etc., y'know, an X-terminal (heh) just without the X window graphics around it.

    I'll use it to script mp3 playlists and such.

  • actually I've been wanting to try setting up the VT 220 terminal I've got, but haven't had a chance to do anything yet.....

    "Leave the gun, take the canoli."
  • You're going to have a heck of a time bringing up X on that terminal -- trust me on this one. ((Note to the wise, VT100 Terminals do text only, I repeat, text only))

    M
  • First, a plug for my own project: 125 486-based X terminals in use at a high school in the school district I work for. Click here! [k12.ca.us]

    Next, the xtermkit [solucorp.qc.ca] I used in our project - it's written by Jacques Gelinas of linuxconf fame.

    And lastly, check out the Linux Terminal Server Project [ltsp.org]. Another form of basically the same concept.

    Check them out - I fully believe X terminals are a wonderful way to reduce costs - hardware, software, and management - when compared to more traditional desktop computer systems.

  • Since they're just X-terminals, maybe you could get a bunch of identical, low end Pentium laptops, and bolt them down.

    If you could get docking stations too, that would avoid the need for PCMCIA NICs.

    An my list of things to do is to turn my Thinkpad 500 into an X-terminal.

    George
  • That might not be such a bad idea, but a pentium class laptop could get expensive. I'm typing this on my ThinkPad 360CE (486DX2/50 in case you're wondering), and it cost me about $250 2 months ago. That doesn't include the network card. You might want to consider a small 486 system, since you won't be running any apps locally (other than the X-server of course). You could probably manage to get them to boot over the network, so you'd need only minimal disk space.

    Speaking of X-servers, I'd like to get an old Sun 3/60 running as an X-server. Only problem with it is I have no hard disk for it, and I'm not sure if the tape drive works at all. Anyone know if I can get it to boot via over the network, using a linux box as the boot server?
  • are probably a good idea. Though certainly not big ones (if you can find a bunbch of old 300 meg - 1 gig IDE disks cheap you're set). I've seen zip disk based distros that included X and most other stuff (basically we turned a room of NT machines into X-terminals for a programming contest). You really want to have cache locally, and you probably don't want to have to NFS mount /var and /tmp (sounds veeerryy messy to me). Especially because if you reboot the server holding those partitions (or it crashes), probably bad things will happen to all the clients when they can't find a /tmp.

    I should think that old Pentiums should work well (there's some place near my house that sells (or sold) 100 Mhz Pentium machines (with 1 Gig disks, 32 megs of RAM, and Ethernet) for $100 - that's where my brothers got their machines). A 15'' monitor is probably another $100. So going that route you'll end up paying $200-$250 for a single box, which not only would work great as an X server, but also do well as a stand-alone machine.

    Laptops and LCDs seem a bit expensive for something like this but maybe I'm wrong.
  • You will want to check out the linux terminal server project [ltsp.org] and maybe also this site [umn.edu].
    I suggest not having hard drives. Go with a bootrom or an etherboot-enabled floppy disk. And definately go for full-duplex ethernet. 10 or 100 mbits, depending on what kind of hardware you can get.
  • Ok, this is K-12 right? Why do Linux at all? Let me say this at the beginning....I LOVE LINUX! That being said, Linux still has a place, and I don't think it would do that well in a K-12 setting unless it would be only for Internet. Remember the K-12, especially the K-6 group probably want to run things like Reader Rabbit, National Geographic and Encarta type CD's which are WINDOWS ONLY! That being said, unless Wine works will all packages FLAWLESSLY, I would not even ATTEMPT to do Linux in this space. 9-12 maybe, and 7-8 is a bit iffy, but for the whole thing, K-12, probably not. Like I said I LOVE LINUX, it's just that it can;t run the Windows things these sappy instructors need to run.

    That being said if I were to do a similar project, I'd run a old P-75 for the terminal as they are excellent machines anyway under Linux(I still used one most of last year at work. Running 95 it was dog slow, when I partitioned it and ran Caldera Openlinux on it, it ran like a champ!). Look for a IT outlet place in your area as I doubt I'd want to pay to ship something like this! If you know someone who has a connection to a companies IT dept, you can ask them what they do with their old machines, then if the liquidate, ask who their liquidator is. This way you can get a bunch of machines with the same vid chipset and very similar configs.

  • You still seem to be missing what an X Terminal is (or was.) X terminals are machines that have X servers (the graphical display) running, but don't execute X client applications themselves.

    An X server would be able to run things like Netscape and the Gimp. You won't be able to do that on your VT100 no matter how hard you try. (Unless you want to create an X server that draws ASCII art in escape sequences onto the terminal for a whopping 132x25 resolution.)

    Also, "telnet" implies some sort of network connection, which a VT100 doesn't have, it just has full duplex serial connnection. Telnet mimics over a network what hardwired (like the VT100) terminals do.

    In other words, I don't think the coffee really helped.
  • Remote terminal, yes. X-terminal, no. VT-100's are just 80x25 or 132x25 text all the way. I've got a half dozen of them sitting around. No they are not for sale. They setup pretty easily on a serial line to a linux box. man getty for more info.

  • Too bad the I-opener isn't available... (Score:3)

    by MattT ( 130844 ) on Friday May 05, 2000 @05:40AM (#1089974) Homepage
    But at the $350 price point, I don't think the LCD screens would be are available any other way. If you can use say a 15" CRT (looks OK at 1024x768)... Then you have lots of options for putting together standardized boxes with reasonable specs. You may want to look at the "Book PC" type machines discussed here earlier... The ones based on the i810 chipset are pretty well supported by linux (with the exception of the winmodem, which wouldn't be needed in your application anyway).
    Good luck!
  • There seem to be a fair number of people suggesting DEC terminals (and I think someone mentioned NCD) -- I disagree. If you're planning on using these things for a while, you're better off getting something new and commodity. (Having said that, though, I'd suggest Sparc classics, which are pretty cheap and surprisingly powerful.)

    If you're worried about maintainability, that sort of thing, I think you'd be better off going for easily clonable machines than Xterms or a centralized setup. Put an OS image on a server and create an install disk that basically dumps the image to the disk. There are fancier techniques, of course, but the basic idea is that you can make changes to the single OS image and spend ten minutes setting the machines to reload and reboot before leaving for the night. It'll save you a ton of effort and is probably the simplest way to propagate changes to machines.

    You can get a fair bit of machine now for $350. Put $200 into the monitor -- say a new 17". (At least get a new monitor: they're going to be the most fragile part of the system.) Then for the system, look for early PII, maybe some cheap old Celerons floating around; you can usually get a decent setup there for $100. (And put the extra $50 into the server or 100bT networking...)

    Take advantage of price points. For example, around here, new or near-new hard drives have a point of about $100 -- i.e. 4 GB cost ~$90, but 15 GB cost about $110. So for an extra $20, you have a whole new set of options.

    Another option, which might not go over well depending on your setup, is to go out and get a bunch of those "free" computers. They're usually Celerons with a 15" monitor (which is more than adequate), and might possibly even come with onboard Ethernet. As for the ISP cost that comes with the machines: either hand the accounts out to students (possibly allowing you to use grant money from other sources, depending on how you present it) or consider it a low-interest loan (which could work well if inflation goes up).
  • try putting in more ram in them instead of a hard drive. 128 meg, instead of a hard drive, configure properly could be very fast.

    Picture booting of bootrom or floppy, dhcp to configure networking, download most important bin's and libs to ramdisk with tftp or nfs, nfs mount everything else (don't need much, else, you are just running an X-server/terminal...).

    Lets say after the ramdisk, you've left 32 meg at the least for your X-server to run in... It's plenty. :)

    All these machines would start X as an XDMCP query to your master server. Everyone is then logging into your beefy master server, with the apps running on it alone.

    Only downside is when your Master Server dies or is rebooted... Everyone is bumped out.

    Put cheap s3 video cards in these babies, or something else inexpensive.

    Okay, my reply is long enough. Enjoy. :)

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