Guest yan0 Posted September 4, 2007 Report Share Posted September 4, 2007 Hi there, I don't seem to see any article anywhere that mentions about the hardware requirement when you add another terminal to your Linux workstation. For a workstation, of course you'llneed a fully functiona pc, right... How about the next terminal? I know that I'll need a serial cable to connect the workstation and the new terminal but just what does the "new terminal" consist of? I'm not sure if I'm doing it right, but I have another pc at home, and it's old. I mean really old. It's an 80286 w/ 64KB RAM and it's running, except that it doesn't have a harddisk. What I wanted to do is to connect it to my Linux box. Is the hardware I mentioned enough for this or do I have to add a hard disk drive? Finnally, how do I start the new terminal? Thanks very much! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
camorri Posted April 9, 2008 Report Share Posted April 9, 2008 Have you resolved this? Or are still trying to get the old 286 machine to act as a terminal? Terminals usually supply some sort of hardware adapter, that can 'speak' a protocol the host system can talk through the connection. Now a 286 based system, as far as I know will not boot any sort of linux system. I believe you need at least a 386 based processor. So, if you can boot Dos, there are terminal emulation programs available. Then a serial connection is probably the easy way to connect. You can boot dos from a floppy, you don't need a hard disk for that. I would have to scratch around to find the software to emulate a terminal. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pindakoe Posted April 9, 2008 Report Share Posted April 9, 2008 This brings back memories when RAM was expensive and computers were slow. Software I used was Kermit, which acted as terminal emulator and fiole-transfer protocol (not fast, but robust). This ran perfectly on PC's which I recall had ~640 Kb RAM and maybe somewhat less. CPU's weere 286, but also 8086. Kermit is probably overkill as it provides a lot more functionality than terminal emulator, but had good DEC VT100 emulation (maybe even VT220 and I have faint memories of Tektronix emulation) which was what I needed to connect to VAXen (mainly running VMS, although I think I have connected to Linux as well). This will confine you to command line, but is easy to set up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.