[TriLUG] Dumb Terminals?

[Lisa C. Boyd]

Reggie wrote:
>I've done exactly what you mention as your first idea and it worked
>great.  I helped to facilitate a basic Linux class during a NSBE
>(National Society of Black Engineers, http://www.nsbe.org) regional
>meeting for collegiates at UNC last year.  We used an existing lab and
>people telnet'd into my laptop (PIII700, 256M RAM at the time) and ran
>various commands, even compiling a few things.  The compilation was
>painful on the laptop mainly due to the horrible disk I/O, but
>everything worked without a hitch.  A physical server with a decent
>processor/ram/disk subsystem would be perfect.

Hm. This is an interesting concept also - I was thinking of setting up a 
lab from scratch, but using existing computers may be a possibility in some 
situations. I've been looking for an excuse to get a laptop too :)

>The machines you mention are *way* more than enough.  If all you need is
>telnet or ssh, you can fit everything on a single floppy (either DOS
>with packet drivers for whatever NIC you choose or a mini-Linux distro).

Cool. All good information to know. So if I were to use an existing setup, 
could I conceivably have the computers boot from floppy and not mess up 
whatever is on the computer?

Ah - more information to digest and more possibilities :) Thanks Reggie for 
the additional information!

Lisa B.