[KLUG Members] Notes from purchase of little diskless box from a1scs computer sale.

[Bruce Smith]

> Thought some on the list might be interested in the progress in an
> attempt to get a mini diskless host up and running.  It's a visara 1783
> thin client workstation.  
> 
> http://www.visara.com/Products/ThinClients.htm
> 
> It contains a cyrix 233 processor with a heat sink only, so no fan
> noise.  It has one pci OR isa slot available for an adder card.  On the
> motherboard are all the standards like paralell/serial/usb/ ethernet and
> vga.  It also has one IDE connector for hard drives and cdroms, but no
> place to mount or connections to power them.  It looked intriguing so I
> paid $25 for one of them from a vendor at the show.  He said at the time
> they had a bunch of them.

> I had it at home for a few weeks when I gave it a whirl.  There was an
> existing operating system that looked very x-windows-ish.  It would
> recieve an ip address from dhcp.  The installed os had a few clients on
> it for mainframes (not telnet) and citrix.  All other settings were
> password protected so I could not change any settings other than through
> dhcp.  It had a QNX4.x format on it when I got that far.

Running Linux on this is very cool, but what does it do "off the shelf"?

Would it be a working replacement for a X-Terminal?  We have a lot of 
X-terminals at work, and if these would do the same thing, it could save
us a lot of money at $25 a piece.

I'd like to try Linux/LTSP working on one, but I don't want to spend that
much time for every one, considering the number of X-terminals we have.

--------------------------------------------
Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
http://www.armstrong-intl.com/
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