On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 10:07:45PM -0000, Andrew Ball wrote:
>   DAT> I use my old hardware as thin clients and run the apps
>      > themselves on my big Athlon box.
> 
> I have done something similar experimentally as a 'proof of concept'.
> Ideally I would like the graphical terminals to run from a read-only
> filesystem.  Do you have the terminals automatically connect to the
> Athlon host, perhaps to present a selection of icons for available
> application programs?

No.  I run a standard OS.  User's (me mostly) login as normal then ssh
to the athlon box.  .ssh/authorized_keys are set up so that no further
passwords are required.

This type of setup is quite simple.  The only /home/~ directories that
need to change are .ssh and .icewm and can be used on NetBSD, OpenBSD,
or Debian (don't know about other linuxs); fits on a floppy if need be,
or in a directory on the athlon to be pushed with rsync.

I use icewm on the slim clients and have the toolbar icons set up; some
for the local box (e.g. links, xpdf; only show up if they exist), others
for the Athlon (e.g. Konqueror, xpdf, kpdf, plus one to the schroot on
the Athlon amd64 to run iceweasel (firefox) in i386 with flash).

Note that the window manager runs on the local (slim client)'s X server.
Only the applications run on the Athlon.  Most uses don't hit swap on my
P-II with 64 MB ram, unless I run Kpdf or Konqueror with lots of tabs.

Doug.