Re: Diskless thin clients

Angel wrote:
Tim Judd <tjudd01@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don't see much activity for NetBSD in most/all of the resources combined. The latest NetBSD release (3.1) was released on November 4, 2006. It's seemed stalled, but I'm not following NetBSD very closely.

Really? What a pity! I hope it's just a stall short period and
everything resumes soon :-)

NetBSD certainly has a niche in what it does, I'm just not sure if it's still being worked on or not. It's not an OS I personally can use easily. I just rarely see a post here and nothing much new on web forums or their home page about it.

I really hate to do this, but FreeBSD can run diskless (terminal server) as well. It's got a greater number of people following and using it (over NetBSD) and it works well. I have a home-setup of FreeBSD

I know. I've also been looking at the same time as I was looking at
NetBSD. Since I have the impression that NetBSD footprint is smaller (I
have only installed NetBSD under qemu until now, not on real hardware)
and performance might be better, I though it could be worth to look at
NetBSD first. I really want to get a robust and powerful terminal server which allows me to use very thin clients (both real thin clients as well
as old PC hardware). Won't NetBSD give me any advantages over FreeBSD
on that?

What advantages? FreeBSD 5.x was the first one to stop supporting the 486 processors out-of-the-box install. I am pretty sure you can recompile it back in and get it working (If I remember correctly). I don't know what CPUs NetBSD supports out-of-the-box.

I think they're both pretty thin. I'm not going to guesstimate disk space size because I would be inaccurate in what you're looking for. I can hand you some information about using PXELINUX (believe it or not) that can let the people choose weather they want Linux (if you want to keep it), FreeBSD or NetBSD. Just can possibly mean more system administration to keep three OSes up-to-date against security problems and whatnot.

I'll let you make your decision. You're fee to call on us if you need more help.
.

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