Re: thinknic

["Jason M. Felice" <jfelice@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sean Porterfield wrote:

> Anyone have any luck getting tn5250 on a NIC?  (
> http://www.thinknic.com/ )
> 
> I'm thinking about getting some and wondered if it was feasable.

We got one, and I've played around with it a bit.  It would require 
burning a new CD for it to boot from.  This
is certainly feasible.  It just a matter of determining what versions of 
stuff they're using on the CD (like, is it
basically a hacked RH6.2, for example), compiling a tn5250 binary for 
that distro, copying it to the CD, and
providing some way to start it.  Burn the CD and voila.

Okay, lets take a look at the CD:

Okay, there is an rxvt on the CD, but no real xterm (xterm is a symbolic 
link to rxvt).
libc.so.6, so it's a glibc2 system (rh62), but...
libncurses.so.5 (rh62 has libncurses.so.4 - at least mine does).

An ldd of tn5250 executable tells me it also needs libglib1.2, and 
amazingly enough, that exists on the CD.  (I wonder why - Oh.. the 
utilities seem to be gtk+ utilities).

You should be able to copy libncurses.so.4 and supporting libraries to a 
CD image, tn5250 and lib5250 (be sure to re-run ldconfig with the 
cd-image's root specified).

There is a cgi-bin program on localhost called `runapp' or something.  
It looks for a `.desktop' file to determine what to run.  You might be 
able to figure out how to edit the menu information to add tn5250 to the 
menus.

Alternately, you could run tn5250 on some sort of server and make it an 
X client of the NIC.  I ran gimp and
xeyes on the NIC that way, and the performance is pretty good, although 
you may need a pretty beefy server.

These NICs RULE!  A $200 color dumb terminal with web browsing and email 
capabilities!  (Okay, so you have to buy a monitor, too.)

And all that is without any help from thinknic.  According to the 
licenses directory on the CD, everything seems to be under an Open 
Source license; you might be able to get ThinkNIC's build environment 
and source for their custom utilities and kernel modifications (if any).

-Jason

P.S.  If you decide to persue this and have any luck, let me know.

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