neitzels irrelevant irregular intarweb notes

fz rocks the kitchen

With ample SSD space on alexis and alexis running 24/7, it made sense to re-active an old X Terminal, fz, an NCD Explora 451. Unlike the IGEL X terminals, the NCD has no permanent local storage and depends on some BOOTP/TFTP/NFS infrastructure to load its software and configuration.

The display is an old 1024x768 TFT monitor, maxing out both the Explora's VGA connectivity and its 2MB video RAM at 16bit "true color" depth. Well... it's good enough for the kitchen and certainly saves me from lugging around one of the (1024x600) netbooks.

With just 32MB of RAM, there is few software supposed to be run on the Explora beyond the X Server proper. Beyond a console to configure and debug the device, there is just a very basic, optional local window manager, a VT320 emulating telnet client, and an XDMCP chooser. (Other possible local features require licenses I lack.)

Typically, you request a session from some other host on the local network. Here is a close-up view of the Explora running a session on randy, the SGI Indigo with its 4DWM window manager:

Looks just like the real McCoy, doesn't it? Getting a session from alexis (the 60$ ARM board running Debian-Wheezy) is possible, too. The tweaks required to make lightdm cooperative:

/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf: [SeatDefaults] xserver-allow-tcp=true [XDMCPServer] enabled=true

The default background for Debian's GTK greeter takes awfully long to transfer to the X server, some solid color is much better:

/etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf: background=#000000

For some unknown reason, the "US" keyboard layout left both \| keys on my (German) keyboard undefined. Xmodmap(1) to the rescue:

keycode 19 = backslash bar
keycode 83 = backslash bar

I also had provide an rgb.txt file on the TFTP server to get colors when asking, e.g., for xlogo -bg red.

Lastly, here is a summary what debian packages needed to be installed on the Olinuxo board which arrives very frugally out-of-the-box:

• bootp
• tftpd-hpa
• openbsd-inetd (to run the first two)
• telnetd (because there's only the telnet client on the NCD to log into the ARM board, and commuting between kitchen and living room soon becomes a nuisance)
• rsyslog, rsyslog-doc (to have an eye on the new daemons and the client/server interactions)
• nas-bin (the Network Audio System clients; ofcourse the NCD does NAS!)
• xfs (the X font server)

The only but noteworthy dependencies triggered by all this: rsyslog triggered the installation of...

• logrotate
• cron
• exim4

Looks as if alexis is taking up some speed now...