Recently in Terminals -- dumb and otherwise Category

This week's Tech Talk column covers the creation of what I call The Self-Reliant Thin Client, which is basically a very-bare-bones PC that is booting and running off of a Compact Flash module instead of a traditional spinning hard drive.

Here is the photo gallery, which will get full captions when I get the time to write them.

I have been wanting to test solid-state storage technology for some time now, and with the solid-state drive option for Mac laptops costing $600 (over and above the MacBook's $1,600 price), the drives themselves as laptop replacements in 64 GB sizes going for $170, I decided to use the slower but way cheaper Compact Flash technology, which is very common in high-end digital cameras.

I finally got an 8 GB Compact Flash chip from newegg.com for about $20, and I'm backing up my user files on a USB flash drive plugged into the back of the box.

The box — which started out as a Maxspeed Maxterm thin client — is running Debian Etch.

There was a time when I was fascinated with the idea of using thin clients as actual computers.

My "first" Linux box, which spawned dozens of distro reviews and many hundreds of blog posts was a Maxspeed Maxterm thn client that worked so well as a stand-alone PC because it was basically a mini-ITX motherboard and small power supply crammed into a thin box.

I daisy-chained a few IDE data and power cables through a hole in the back of the thin client so I could hook up a CD-ROM and hard drive outside the small box. Adding a keyboard, mouse, monitor and 256MB stick of PC-133 RAM, I was ready to go.

At that point, the Maxspeed functioned pretty much like any other computer. Anything that could run on a VIA C3 Samuel processor could run on the box. That wasn't everything, mind you, but it was enough to get by.

I'm thinking about buying a new test box -- something cheap (I never want to spend more than $50 on any computer), probably in the Pentium III range, maybe a Pentium 4 if I get a deal.

That and the fact that the Daily News is moving a few blocks down the road to a new office, which has me throwing away massive amounts of paper and inventorying all the tech garbage I've accumulated over the past couple of years.

In one of my file drawers, I found an HP/Compaq t5300 533MHz 32/64 thin client that I got for about $10 on eBay.

I wanted to see if I could run Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux on it, but once I got the thin client in the mail (hey, for $10 I didn't do a whole lot of research on it), I pulled it open and saw that replacing the flash memory with something programmable would be difficult. It wasn't made of off-the-shelf-parts like the Maxspeed.

But it did work. The 32MB RAM, 64MB flash, 533MHz box, with keyboard, mouse and monitor connected, booted to what looks like a Windows CE desktop. Included is a CE version of Internet Explorer (something from the IE4 era, I think), and enough utilities to enable me to set a static IP and get networking into the box.

Not every Web site looks pretty in a cutdown IE4, but surprisingly the thing can (almost but not quite) post an entry to Movable Type 4.1 with relative ease, even if it crashed repeatedly crashing the browser when I saved the entry.

At least it saved. And since the browser starts in about 2 seconds on this little, fanless and completely silent HP box, there are worse things than crashing the browser. I eventually crashed the entire thin client, but it does recover remarkably quickly.

I'd still like to get a thin client working with Linux, not as a quasi-PC with full hard drives but with nothing but solid-state memory. Once I finally get a new text box (I'm thinking something generically Dell or HP), I'll use the Maxspeed in the way it was intended — almost. It's flash memory is a CF card (and no, it didn't come with the original), and I plan to install Puppy Linux on that CF card and run it as a silent workstation, perhaps saving my files on a USB flash drive (or on the CF itself).

Let me just say that in the days before I got my hands on two nearly free laptops, I had a lot of fun with thin clients.

The HP has built-in terminal software in addition to RDP and Citrix capability (I hardly know what either of those means), so I could use it as a non-X terminal (not terribly exciting) or try to sell it for what I can get on eBay (likely).

As for my new test box, I've seen quite a few promising candidates in the Pentium III and 4 range. I'd like something that can run 1 GB of RAM, but I will take 512 MB if necessary. I did see one with 1.5 GB capability. I have a pretty good feeling that a nearly 2 GHz CPU with 1 GB of RAM will run things very, very well when it comes to Linux and the BSDs.

I've seen some nice things for $60, but I'd rather part with $25, or get something for free. The latter has happened before, and it could happen again.

I've been looking into getting a dumb terminal. I've seen quite a few used ones. I don't want to pay much, but I do want it to work. US Computer Exchange has a quite few that fit the bill, but I have no idea whether the keyboard is included, or what exactly I'd be getting.

Ideally, I'd like to find a working DEC terminal, or even an old adm3a (hopefully one with lower case ... yep, they made them with upper-case only), even though they were dying when I first used them in the 1980s. I can only imagine what shape they're in 20 years later.

Ideally, I'd like to spend no more than $25.

I found this interesting Web page on dealing with dumb terminals and Unix. It might be helpful.

Also: check out VT100.net, one of the best sources of information for DEC terminals.

And that site led me to The Archive of Video Terminal Information, which includes the "interesting Web page on dealing with dumb terminals" link above. So I'm in a terminal loop, or so it appears.