Linux Terminal Server (XDMCP)

[voidmain]

So I'm sitting here trying to work on my old Dell laptop with 64MB of RAM wishing I had a nice shiney fast one with plenty-o-RAM. When all of a sudden, out of the blue, it "hit me" (just like my wife says at the blackjack table). Why the hell am I sitting on this living room couch fighting with this slow ass laptop when I can harness the power of my Athlon 1600 w/512MB of RAM sitting out in the kitchen?

So now I have an Athlon 1600+ w/512MB of RAM right here in my laptop (still only an 800x600 display, haven't figured out how to get the 21" display through the network to my 800x600 laptop, but then I wouldn't be able to see the TV anyhoo).  

How did I do it?

On my Athlon I just logged in to my RedHat 8.0 machine, then clicked:

"Start Here->System Settings->Login Manager"

NOTE: The above does nothing more than run "gdmsetup" if you are not on RedHat 8.0 but use "gdm" as your login manager. At any rate, when you have the gdmsetup screen up just click the "XDMCP" tab and select "Enable XDMCP" if it is not enabled. You'll need to restart GDM for this to take effect. That's it!!

Now on the Laptop I just put it in runlevel 3 (non-graphical login prompt) and logged in to a virtual terminal and typed:

$ X -broadcast

Bingo, I got a graphical login screen just as if I were sitting at my desktop, I log in and got my desktop that I normally get at my desktop (except in 800x600 as that's all my laptop is capable of). Now this doesn't effect the local logon screen at the desktop, my wife and kids can log in to it just like I'm not even there.  It's just as fast as being there! Life is *so* much better now.

Couple of notes if you would also like to try this. Make sure you either have your firewall turned off on the server side (or open up the appropriate ports in your iptables config) and make sure you have xfs running on the client side (it should be by default, even in runlevel 3).

Happy speedy computing on your old crappy equipment!

[ October 05, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Bazoukas]

thats DAMN AWESOME. I can use that with my laptop.  I just need to get me a nic card for my laptop.

[voidmain]

I'm shocked. Even VMware runs beautifully running over this setup! I got the power!

[mobrien_12]

You can also use the "query" option of X to go to one server directly.. useful for large networks with a lot of servers on them.

I did this trick a few years ago with a 486 with 8MB and a 50 MB hard drive to set up an email terminal for my group.  It used "query" to go directly to the school's unix mainframe and ran quite well.

Unfortunately, most of them wanted to walk over to a Windows machine and use telnet instead....    :mad:

[voidmain]

Yeah, I have actually used this quite a bit several years ago (circa 1994-5) when we had several RS/6000 servers and I was using Linux boxes to connect to those servers. At that time it took a little reading and understanding of what files had to be configured to make it work.

I was shocked to find it on the menu and just took a single click to turn it on. I don't know why I didn't think of using this with my laptop before. Shit I've been sufferin' for a couple of years on this old hunk of Dell with bandaids holding it together. I got a real hard head sometimes (most of the time).