This is a question about unix, not linux, but I thought what the heck. Maybe someone will know an answer to this.

My high school received three SGI servers (not sure the model #) from a donation and they are running Irix 6 something. My teacher wants to be able to administer them easily, and since they do not have video cards, we have to console in through a serial port to get to the command line (vi and Hyper Terminal do NOT mix, so its very difficult to edit large text files). The funny thing is, they have a bunch of X windows applications in the /usr/sbin directory. Why would SGI provide Irix CDs with X applications if the servers do not come with video cards?

So i was thinking that since sometimes X server opens a port when it starts, is there a way to connect to that port with another computer and view the servers X windows? In other words, if the SGI machine was Comp A, and Comp B was some workstation networked to A, could I start a server on A, and connect to it with B? I'm not sure of a program that can connect to and view an X server. Any ideas on how to actually use these X applications?

they're probably there in case you want to make it into an "x terminal server"... this is usually done when you wanna use "thin clients"... in other words, diskless workstations would connect to the server and run the x apps on the server, while viewing them as if they were actually running on the client machine...

here a link to the k12 linux terminal server, they'll probably have some good documentation... it won't apply directly to irix but you'll get the idea...

http://k12ltsp.org/contents.html