Diskless Linux X Terminals

摘要

The X terminal is not a new idea; companies such as NCD have been manufacturing them for 15 years or more. The thin client idea fell out of fashion during the late 1990s, however, as the price of PC hardware fell so low that there was no obvious cost advantage to using X terminals. Heated arguments ensued over the total cost of ownership (including both the cost of the hardware and administrative support) of thin clients vs. PCs, and the debate will not be resolved by this article. The objective here is simply to describe a technique that allows one to utilize some of the growing pile of obsolete hardware left in the wake of advancing PC technology to build X terminals. The essential characteristic of any thin client is that it should have little or no persistent storage. Typically, a purpose-builrX terminal has a small quantity of NVRAM used to store configuration options and nothing else. In practice, it usually is possible to put even these options in a configuration file stored on the server and downloaded by the terminal on boot. This article takes the purist view that an X terminal should have no persistent storage whatsoever.