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 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!

Google for keywords like linux serial console howto.

There are no additional hardware requirements except for a serial port.

Using a PC as a terminal would still require some kind of operating system like DOS (linux can only run on a 80386 or better CPU), a communications program, a monitor and of course a functioning serial port. kermit and procomm were two of my favorites communication programs. Its been awhile but I believe that one or both could run from a floppy drive. However, you did not mention anything about a functioning floppy drive i.e. 360K or 720K etc. BTW you need a null modem serial cable to connect two PCs together.

It will be a good project to learn about computer basics as well as a history lesson.

Hahaha, you're right.. It's really good to study computer history considering that the computer I'm trying to work on is a primitive one.

Anyway, it does have a floppy drive, though I don't know if it's working. The problem is that the drives are 5 1/4 inch disks and to make things worse, it's not using IDE cables. That means I just can't pull them out and replace them with floppy drives that uses IDE.

I don't know if there's a work around here...

what is the scenario if the computer is a PI 233 MHz 128 MB Ram and linux can be loaded on it but it works slowly.

I wish to connect it to an AMD machine (new) already running debian etch. I wish to connect it through terminal.

BTW floppy drives do not use IDE interface but anyway more then likely this PC does not support 1.44MB so replacing it isn't an option if the current 5 1/4 does not work. So getting this PC to work without software already in hand is going to be a real challange if not impossible.

sunils1973, A lightweight windows manager like fluxbox and slackware would run ok on a computer with this hardware.

Thank you very mucgh. I shall try for slackware.

Hehehe, yeah I forgot, that's not IDE... Hehehe.
Anyway, it really seems impossible though...Too bad for me.

Ok, how about the boot loader?
I mean, I have a very slow machine which runs slackware. The thing is I want to a have an option during boot time whether to boot normally OR connect to an Xserver via serial.

How do I do that?

Thanks guys.