Unix questions - X server

Author

X server

brice rebsamen

2006-11-14, 7:24 pm

Hi

Is it possible to use one computer as a main station, i.e. with
applications and data on it, an another one that would access all these
resources via the network?

What I want to do is to use my computer in the living room as the main
one, to listen to music, watch movies and all, but I want to have
another one in another room to work on it. I have a spare computer, but
it's a PII so I am afraid it would be way to slow to run efficiently
anything.

So I was thinking I could use the main computer as a X server, and the
other one as a X client. Isn't it the purpose of X?

Is that possible, or not at all?

Brice

Barry Margolin

2006-11-15, 1:30 am

In article <ejdmq5$iqj$1@mawar.singnet.com.sg>,
brice rebsamen <brice@nus.edu.sg> wrote:

> Hi
>
> Is it possible to use one computer as a main station, i.e. with
> applications and data on it, an another one that would access all these
> resources via the network?
>
> What I want to do is to use my computer in the living room as the main
> one, to listen to music, watch movies and all, but I want to have
> another one in another room to work on it. I have a spare computer, but
> it's a PII so I am afraid it would be way to slow to run efficiently
> anything.
>
> So I was thinking I could use the main computer as a X server, and the
> other one as a X client. Isn't it the purpose of X?
>
> Is that possible, or not at all?

Yes, that's precisely what X was designed for.

--
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***
*** PLEASE don't copy me on replies, I'll read them in the group ***

Rich Gibbs

2006-11-15, 1:30 am

brice rebsamen said the following, on 11/14/06 20:12:
> Hi
>
> Is it possible to use one computer as a main station, i.e. with
> applications and data on it, an another one that would access all these
> resources via the network?
>
> What I want to do is to use my computer in the living room as the main
> one, to listen to music, watch movies and all, but I want to have
> another one in another room to work on it. I have a spare computer, but
> it's a PII so I am afraid it would be way to slow to run efficiently
> anything.
>
> So I was thinking I could use the main computer as a X server, and the
> other one as a X client. Isn't it the purpose of X?
>
> Is that possible, or not at all?
>

Yes. X was designed with networking in mind. As an example, even back
in the early 1990s, when I was working in London, we would sometimes
demo a new application "remotely" for our Paris or New York offices,
using X over the network (plus a telephone connection so we could talk,
of course ;-). That worked OK even over a fairly slow trans-Atlantic
link, and on a local net it works just fine.

One thing that may be slightly confusing at first is the terminology.
The X _server_ runs on the machine that is providing the display,
keyboard, and mouse that the user employs. It provides a virtualized
GUI device to one or more X _client_ applications. So in your proposed
setup, the main machine in the living room would be running X clients,
with the X server running on the satellite machine.

--
Rich Gibbs
richg74@gmail.com
"You can observe a lot by watching." -- Yogi Berra

Alan Connor

2006-11-15, 1:30 am

On comp.unix.questions, in <ejdmq5$iqj$1@mawar.singnet.com.sg>,
"brice rebsamen" wrote:

> Hi
>
> Is it possible to use one computer as a main station, i.e. with
> applications and data on it, an another one that would access
> all these resources via the network?

Yes. That's the other function (besides graphics) of X.

>
> What I want to do is to use my computer in the living room as
> the main one, to listen to music, watch movies and all, but I
> want to have another one in another room to work on it. I have
> a spare computer, but it's a PII so I am afraid it would be way
> to slow to run efficiently anything.

Doesn't take as much as you think to run X. If you keep it
simple, as little as 4MB of RAM will work just fine.

If you use a minimal Linux install on the 'remote' machine,
that'll help a lot. I have X running on a complete Linux OS
installed on a 10M partition on this box. Got room to spare.
Less than a MB (hdd) for the xserver and necessary x-utilities.

With X up and an 'xterm' running, the total memory footprint
is 6.4MB.

The Xvesa, generic i386, server, a security risk on the Internet,
would work fine in your home. Installation and configuration are
a breeze because it doesn't care what your hardware is.

Do keep in mind that I am not into 'multi-media', don't run a
GIDE like KDE, and minimize the use of x-apps, choosing console
tools when possible, though I operate from an 'xterm'.

<snip>

Alan

--
http://home.earthlink.net/~alanconnor/contact.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~alanconn...ival/index.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~alanconn...unix/index.html

Andrew Smallshaw

2006-11-15, 1:20 pm

On 2006-11-15, brice rebsamen <brice@nus.edu.sg> wrote:
>
> What I want to do is to use my computer in the living room as the main
> one, to listen to music, watch movies and all, but I want to have
> another one in another room to work on it. I have a spare computer, but
> it's a PII so I am afraid it would be way to slow to run efficiently
> anything.

Don't totally discount the PII as a computer in it's own right.
I use an ageing IBM ThinkPad PII 266 as my primary laptop and it
does most stuff fine - things like OpenOffice and Mozilla take a
few seconds to load but are perfectly usable. Added to that -
being so old it's no great loss if it gets lost/stolen/damaged
meaning it's a lot more useful than top of the range laptops that
the owner doesn't dare take anywhere in case something happens to
it.

To answer your question, yes, you can do what you want with X.
You can do it on a per-application basis as well, so things like
an MUA can run on the local machine and only remotely run things
that require a little more power.

--
Andrew Smallshaw
andrews@sdf.lonestar.org