[SGVLUG] SCALE5x Booth - Volunteers and Ideas: LinuxDoc and Dumb Terminals

[David Lawyer]

On Sat, Dec 23, 2006 at 11:46:01PM -0800, Jeff Carlson wrote:
> David Lawyer wrote:
> > What I would personally like to promote is the allegedly obsolete (per
> > Eric Raymond) LinuxDoc sgml markup.  I would like to promote it as
> > potentially more powerful and easier than using DocBook xml for
> > creating documentation, websites, etc.  It needs a maintainer and more
> > than that, needs more development.  Here's what Eric Raymond says
> > about it:
> 
> My rough idea here is that LinuxDoc is less extensible and DocBook has
> greater application and so forth.  LDP and ESR must have reasons for
> wanting to dump LinuxDoc.  Both are driving forces in open source.  I
> would discourage you from rowing upstream on such a mighty river.
> 
It hasn't been easy but right now LDP is about neutral on the subject
now (partly due to me) and I plan to revise their procedures to remove
the existing bias against LinuxDoc.  I recently looked into the
situation and posted results to LDP but I'll not report on it here.
But see some of this at the url below if you're interested.

> > I obviously don't agree.  See my opinion about this at:
> > http://www.lafn.org/~dave/linux/ld_vs_db.txt

> If your computer seriously only has a 3GB HD, please don't bring it to
It's also got 32MB of memory.  It's only 11 years old but my dumb
terminal is 23 years old so isn't it appropriate to run a terminal
this old on an older PC.
> SCALE!  I know, Linux fits on an old computer.  Sure, but let's try to
> make it attractive to people by showing it on what is perceived as
> "cool" modern hardware.  Nobody is going to get a 3GB HD today.  You may
> convince them to dual boot with only a 3GB Linux partition, but HD
> space has been cheap for the last ten years.  If you show someone
> something totally antiquated, they might think it only runs on older
> hardware and that's a turn-off.

With all other exhibits using much newer hardware running Linux, no
one is going to think this.  Today I just read an article by MS's
Linux man (MS assigned someone to look into the Linux situation).  He
ran some tests to see if Linux was better at running older hardware
and reported that it wasn't.  I think he said something like it took
at least 64MB RAM to use a modern commercial Linux distribution.  Well
I've got Debian on 32MB with memory to spare and it works fast with
the lightweight Dillo browser in Xwindow.  But Xwindow is slow to
load.

> > I'm not sure if my dumb terminal would work OK on someone else's
> > computer.
I've used the stock data file for my terminal (which I wrote and
submitted a long time ago) and while it's not my latest revision, it
still works OK.  So using someone else's computer should work provided
they have a getty program for dumb terminals.

> > The config file is
> > complicated and describes in abbreviated code the hundred or so
> > capabilities of the dumb terminal and what codes to send to the
> > terminal to activate them.  For example, what codes do you send to
> > get bold reverse video for a certain phrase?  Normal reverse video
> > ?  Underlining ?  Move the cursor to x,y (where the actual values
> > of x,y are included in the code sent to the terminal)?  Etc.
> > These codes should have been standardized but the hundreds of
> > different models of dumb terminals each did their own thing which
> > required a lot of work creating a lot of config files that are
> > seldom used today.
> 
> First of all, the ncurses library should abstract all that stuff
> about sending the right code to move the cursor to x,y, or bold
> underline whatever.  I'm pretty sure that's its purpose.

> Anyway, don't make a presentation out of the fact getting this to
> work is complicated under the hood.  While it might be cool to see a
> dumb terminal driving a modern PC, LTSP is going to be there with
> their own setup, and I guarantee it will look better than a
> monochrome terminal.

You're right.  But the dumb terminal was the predecessor to the GUI
terminal and it's educational to display both the old and the new
(LTSP).  And they couldn't use the Serial Port for GUI since it failed
to meet the recommendations of the 1888 cable conference of using
twisted pair and thus is far too slow.

> Again, what does this have to do with open source?  Not many shops
> are looking to revitalize their store rooms full of Wyse terminals.

The Wyse terminals are prone to failure so I doubt if many people kept
them.  But the one I use is more reliable and much older.  Terminal
emulation is common.  People that use a command-line-interface use it.
The protocol is the same as for a dumb terminal.

One interesting demonstration could be browsing the Internet with a text
browser.  You seldom see any ads since the dumb terminal can't display
pictures.  While there's no ethernet card on this PC but there is one
on another PC that I could install but I've never used the card.
 
			David Lawyer