Using old laptops as "dumb" X11 clients
 

Can someone kindly point me towards a good howto/documentation or google search term to find out how to set up a couple of old laptops as dumb terminals off a really powerful server I have?

I have a couple of old laptops laying around with 256MB RAM and 11GB harddisk and a Pentium III processor. Not super fast, but should be sufficient to run X11. I want to set them up as "dumb" terminals towards a really powerful server I have, so that all applications etc the user is running happens on the server, and not the dead-slow laptop, and so that the laptop only has to focus on as little as absolutely possible.
The laptops will be running an 802.11G wireless LAN - is the bandwidth sufficient for what I'm setting out to do?

Any pointers to where I can find out how to do this on my local LAN would be greatly appreciated. Preferably in pure X11 and obviously done in Slackware :-)

Thanks in advance for any insight!

-y1

I did something similar a couple of years ago using a laptop whose hd had crapped out. I no longer have it setup, but I know that for documentation I used the howto at ltsp.org, though, ultimately, the system I used was thinstation (thinstation.sf.net.)

I know that I had the system running solely with ltsp, but for reasons I can't recall, I ended up with thinstation.

My apologies for not being more specific, but I'm sure this will help get you started.

cheers,

This is what X does best... it started out as just a protocol to do this sort of thing.
Use the display name to specify a remote machine running X, on which to display the desired application.

Paraphrasing the X man page, most X programs accept a command line option of -display displayname to temporarily override the contents of the environment variable DISPLAY. This is most commonly used to pop windows on another person's screen or as part of a "remote shell" command to start an xterm pointing back to your display.

From the user's perspective, every X server has a display name of the form:
hostname:displaynumber.screennumber

For example,
% xeyes -display joesws:0 -geometry 1000x1000+0+0
% rsh big xterm -display myws:0 -ls </dev/null &

Read the X man page, and also look up xhost, xauth, xon (though xon is not all that useful, imo).
Anyway, setting up the permissions is safe and easy in a local LAN, the above man pages should get you started.

As other posters have pointed out, you can use LTSP, ThinStation, or just plain X redirection to do what you want.

Assuming you have an OS installed on the laptops, other options are to use ssh with X forwarding enabled to ssh from the laptop to the server, or use XDMCP to forward the desktop from the server to the laptop. This latter requires XDMCP and either kdm, gdm, or xdm to be configured on both server and laptop. Note that you can install XMing or another X server on a Windows MS machine to accomplish the same thing.