Sponsored By
Efika 5200B Project
EFIKA Dummy terminalin category Applications & Software
proposed by coze on 31st January 2006 (accepted on 11th February 2006)
Project Summary
I got this idea when I visited my school internet room today. EFIKA can be a perfect terminal for a mainframe network service. The terminal doesn\'t need a hdd or cd-rom, will have the basic linux core and ethernet driver in some kind of flash media inside EFIKA. After bootstrapping from this flash memory it can boot a favor of linux from the ethernet. Each user has a small amount of storage in the terminal\'s RAM as a ram disk, other than that no storage is possible, if it\'s needed a storage on the mainframe can be assigned to users. This idea can also be connected with the flash card security for a rock solid system. This solves a lot of issues with public internet rooms :1 - No need to keep huge desktop cases, which are basicly useless
2 - No risk of a user downloading malicious stuff into his/her own client
3 - Easier maintenance of client OS\'s
4 - Should be cost a effective solution if the EFIKA goes into mass production and become price competitive with desktop pc systems.
Project Blog Entries
Well, for my project to have any meaning there should be a flavor of linux which can run on the EFIKA. So I'm thinking of supporting embedded Gentoo linux project while thinking of a way to run the bootstrap kernel+eth drivers from the EFIKA. In the long run, gentoo is not a very suitable distribution for my project, because it's source based. Since my project targets a platform with minimum variation (at the moment I believe all EFIKAs are identical) I believe an binary based distribution (like debian) will be much more handy. These binaries would be specially compiled for the EFIKA and kept in a local server.
by the way, I'm having this idea of a restriction of executables on the client to the binaries sent from the local mainframe. And fetching these executables from the mainframe on the fly. It's a measure to keep the clients more secure, and be able to update the software on the client even they're running, but it would render the clients useless in case of a mainframe problem. Maybe this could be an option left to the users/admins of the setup.