[Wizard] Thin client rambles

[Cameron Patrick]

On Sat, Aug 30, 2003 at 08:32:32PM +0800, Bernard Blackham wrote:
|  - It's a pretty responsive xterminal. Running Mozilla & XMMS with
|    no troubles at all (okay, a slight lag on the screen refreshes,
|    but easily bearable). The Alt key doesn't work - suspect the
|    abundance of warnings about XKB on startup :)

Probably missing some files.  I'm testing one of mine as an xterm at the
moment, and the alt key works fine - but it's running on a full blown
Debian system by typing "X -dpi 96 -query 10.0.1.2" at the command line.

The 1024x768@60Hz is really getting to me - on a 19" monitor it's close
to intolerable :(  OTOH it'd probably be really nice on a little LCD
monitor where the refresh rate is no longer an issue and 1024x768 is
somewhat more than 72dpi.

BTW have you looked into LTSP?  (http://www.ltsp.org/)  It's really
simple to set up and means that you don't have to screw around with
setting up initrds and X servers residing thereupon yourself.

|  - Fonts need help - I have 2 fonts in the X server itself, so some
|    things cry out for help. Mind you, mozilla, KDE & GTK2
|    applications are happily using their own fonts, oblivious to the
|    X server.  GTK+1 apps revert to the one "fixed" font on it.  In
|    more serious use, a font server would really be required
|    somewhere on the network.

If your terminal server runs debian, it's just a matter of commenting
out "no-listen = tcp" in /etc/X11/fs/config and /etc/init.d/xfs restart

|  - Sound server. If there were any way to put compression into
|    ESoundD, then it'd be ideal, otherwise it really noticeably lag's
|    the X session.

Not convinced.  Compression takes CPU time, and sound doesn't compress
too well - even specialised codecs like FLAC generally only achieve 50%
compression.  Given that CD quality sound is ~1.5 mbit/sec, I'm
surprised that you're seeing much lag at all on a 100 mbit network.
Another hint - if you're running XMMS, turn of its visualisation and
smooth scrolling, they suck network bandwidth like anything.

|    Esd deals with sampling rates, authentication,
|    network transparency, and program transparency (using an
|    LD_PRELOAD wrapper any audio program will be routed through esd).

ESD also sucks badly.  However I have yet to see a decent alternative :(

| Also, re the X server - I've tried all of the X drivers and versions
| I can get my hands on for the chipset, and none of the specialised
| ones work. The VESA driver works adequately, but accelerated would
| be nicer. Rumour had it the fbdev driver was fine too, but even
| slower. Probably some source code tinkering required. :(

Your rumour re. fbdev matches my experience.

BTW I had to comment out the 'Option "DPMS"' line in the XF86Config-4
that dexconf created or KDE would crash and burn while "initialising
peripherals".  Hope that helps someone else :)

I had a look into the random gzipped binary that was on the driver CD in
case it was of any use at all - the chap at Netway seemed to think that
it was, and that the wizard could do 1024x768x24 with it.  However while
it is apparently an ELF executable, it didn't want to run ("No such file
or directory" !?), and ldd didn't want to look at it either.  Hopefully
someone with greater knowledge than I can explain what this means.

(cameroo@merlin ~) file g2-lf-11
g2-lf-11: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped
(cameron@merlin ~) ./g2-lf-11
bash: ./g2-lf-11: No such file or directory

Looking at the output of "strings g2-lf-11" seems to imply that it is
linked to libc.so.5 which could explain why my wizard wouldn't run it.
In particular it looks like XF86_SVGA 3.3 from Jun 1997 (!)   I may
experiment with running it on a (libc5-based) copy of Slackware 3.x
which I have lying around, but even if that works, there _must_ be a
better way.

Cheers,

Cameron.