Re: replacing dumb terminals

I have replaced 7 dumb terminals with 486 Linux PCs running tn5250 on the
console (Alt-F1).  Two of the machines are used in the Admitting Dept (we are a
hospital) which runs 24x7.  Once my users got used to the few keys which where
different they didn't care.  They even like the brighter screen and some of the
colors they didn't see before (there's a purple strip in one area).

I am also able to do other things with it as well.  I have a few machines which
use the Alt-F3 console to run a telnet session to a SCO Unix machine to do lab
result lookup.  The other machines use Alt-F3 to do a 3270 session for insurance
verification.  Alt-F2 uses Lynx to connect to my Intranet Webpage which allows
them to do paging.  The Intranet server is a Linux server which also has Qpage
installed on it and a web front end I created to do web-based paging.  All of
this would not be possible with dumb terminals.

These machines are all 486s with 12-20M ram and 250M disk drives running a
stipped RH 6.1 install without X windows.  The install image is about 100M.  In
the next few months we will upgrade that to a RH 7.1 (maybe 7.2) with all the
same software.  The only reason for the upgrade is just to keep it current.  The
existing install has been in constant use since 1999.  The only problem was when
one of the 486s died and we had to grab another out of storage to replace it.

Jeff Volckaert



tonyl wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Has anyone used tn5250 & linux to replace dumb terminals, specifically for
> the sort of user that enters data all day, every day?
>
> I've only just found this emulator and my testing somewhat limited, though
> I've found a few issues already.
>
> The keyboard mappings! Though it looks like most can be brought into line via
> config files, judging by the list's archive it would appear that the are
> still issues. Has anyone got it exactly as one would expect from using 5250?
>
> Another concern is reliability. My experience has left me with the impression
> that tn5250 has problems launching in X. Sometimes it connects to the host,
> others it doesn't. Initially I had no such problems, where as now it's quite
> common.
>
> 132 column displays appear to be unfinished/buggy, in that going from 80 to
> 132 (wrksplf, seu etc) stretches the window accordingly but leave the screen
> mode in 80 columns; however, not every time.
>
> I'm hoping most, if not all of these problems are related to my configs, X,
> KDE et al.
>
> Feedback would be appreciated from anyone who's been through this before.
>
> Thanks,
> Tony.
>
> PS. Any '400 programmers using it full-time instead of doze/client access?
>
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