Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!rutgers!bpa!cbmvax!uunet!mcvax!ukc!warwick!rlvd!cmc From: cmc@inf.rl.ac.uk (Chris Crampton) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: A Thought on X Terminals Message-ID: <5290@rlvd.UUCP> Date: 28 Feb 89 09:26:56 GMT References: <19613@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <611@gt-eedsp.UUCP> <74@torsqnt.UUCP> Reply-To: cmc@inf.rl.ac.uk (Chris Crampton) Distribution: comp Organization: Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot. UK. Lines: 35 In article <74@torsqnt.UUCP> david@torsqnt.UUCP (David Haynes) writes: >In article <611@gt-eedsp.UUCP> jensen@gt-eedsp.UUCP (P. Allen Jensen) writes: >> >>Many of the X Terminal systems I have looked at (NCD in particular) can down- >>load the server from another system. > >I have a problem with this. You mean you "forsee" a problem with this? Or are you experiencing problems aleady (as this statement suggests)? >I shudder to think >what will happen if 8:30 rolls around and all the workers arrive >to start the day, each boots his X terminal which then starts to >download a server (and fonts???) to the workstation. Slowly the >ethernet sinks into the ground... Hmmm, but why is this going to be any different to the environment many people already have with dozens of diskless nodes all needing to boot over the network? I work is such an environment and have not experienced any problems of this kind at all. The important factor is that most users leave their machines running continuously and so don't need to reboot everyday. Even if users did login afresh every morning, in a workstation environment, then the amount of data needed to be paged in over the network is likely to be significantly more than the volume of a single X server! (X server plus xterm plus xedit plus xclock plus....) I would anticipate that users logged on via X terminals are not going to want to log in every morning - who is going to want to destroy their context of work at the end of the day only to have to rebuild it all the next morning? If X terminals are more environmentally acceptable, as you would expect, then it is going to be even more likely that terminals will be left switched on. Chris.