[TriLUG] Diskless w/s for legacy DOS app?

[Michael Thompson]

We've had success using the LTSP software ( http://www.ltsp.org ).  This
allows us to create boot floppies ( http://www.romomatic.net ) and access
a Linux terminal server from a 'dumb' workstation.  If you can get your
dos app to run from in an emulator under Linux this may work well for you.
 There are configuration options that allow running certain apps locally,
I would assume that you could print locally as well, although we have not
tried this yet.

Michael W. Thompson
Eastern Radiologists, Inc.
Information Technologies Department
Office:(252)754-5244
mailto:thompson at easternrad.com

> My family owns a video store which uses a piece of DOS software.   Every
>  so often one of the hardrives or something will go bad on one of the
> two  registers.(std. pc)  Lately with the price of hardware so low they
> have  decided to invest a bit for reliability.
>
> The DOS software is installed on system A, system B connects via a
> windows share from system A which is mounted as drive M: and launches
> the dos app as m:\dos.exe in a console.  The app prints to a dot matrix
> printer on lpt1 w/o spooling jobs.
>
> So, the linux portion.
>
> I've read linux does diskless workstations well.  Linux does samba quite
>  well.  Linux does dos emulation.
>
> So could I wrap up all of this as a no nonsense workstation void of
> breakable bits like hd's & Windows?
>
> I'd like to burn a cd or write a diskette to boot machine B with
> network, samba and dos emulation support.  This would allow us to make a
>  dumb workstation with the minimum fuss.  Disk goes bad, just shove in
> another copy of said cd/floppy.
>
> Where do I start?  Is the dos emulation pretty solid?  No unix chars
> going to corrupt the DOS software?  Will dos emulated program be able to
>  print to lpt1?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> -bp
>
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