[GRLUG] multiple login on Mac

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Sun, 2012-01-08 at 05:50 -0500, Robar Philip wrote:
>> Probably wouldn't be true today, and X is open, but there’d
> > still be the bandwidth issue for many remote users.
> Today, bandwidth is a non-issue for the X Window System*. One of the
> major advantages of X11 is that it doesn't ship around bits. It’s a 
> client/server system. You run a graphics server locally and the remote
> client just sends you drawing instructions—no bits. Back in the day 
> accessed remote clients over a modem to work from home. It was a
>tolerable experience.

+1  Over local ethernet it works *GREAT*.  That is the whole idea behind
X-terminals and LTSP.  About 15 years ago I had 7 NCD X-terminals and a
couple of LTSP boxes - they accessed a dual-80486DX2/66 [64MB RAM] host
for running applications.  Performance was *really* good.  Clients
handled all the GPU stuff and the server just ran the applications.  The
LTSP boxes[1] had accelerated GPUs [Matrox] and NCD's were primarily
bit-blitter's.  The performance difference was noticeable when doing
things like minimizing or moving windows; but just entering data in a
word processor or spreadsheet cells was instantaneous either way.  Video
playback worked very well on the LTSP boxes but would stutter on the
NCDs.  That was 15 years ago using shared [non-switched] ethernet and
bottom of the rung GPUs.

[1] LTSP boxes were Pentium 133s with 8MB of RAM, Matrox II GPUs, and
Linksys PCI NICs.  They booted from a floppy disk containing a kernel
image and mounted their filesystem from the server via NFS.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://shinobu.grlug.org/pipermail/grlug/attachments/20120108/6c3e33db/attachment.pgp>