How to add a terminal to a Linux workstation?

[Guest yan0]

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!

[camorri 0]

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.

[pindakoe 1]

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.