Radical idea for X-modmap problem.

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

>> (Nowadays, the servers are fairly ordinary PCs running Linux, with
>> a few Solaris machines to make the older system administrators
>> happy.)...

> (I'm afraid to ask how old is 'older'.) (Grad students, maybe?)

Most students don't care, as long as they get whatever userspace tools
they need to do their coursework; the ones that do care (Ubuntu fans,
mostly) bring their own laptops to practicals.  It's the system
administrators who tend to have strong preferences.

> I'm wondering about the connection from terminal to server, and how much
> bandwidth would be typical for such a setting.

100Mbit switched ethernet is fine (native X, not compressed), as long as
the latency is low enough.

In the departments I know, however, this model is slowly dying out.  Now
that fairly powerful fan-less PCs are available at a reasonable price,
we've been migrating to netbooted, disk-less workstations (root mounted
over NFS).  This makes it possible to use things like Eclipse, which
would overwhelm the centralised servers.

> (I'm assuming that college students would spent substantial time
> watching X-rated videos on their X-terminals ;-)

Our students lead fulfilling lives, and have no need for the cheap
ersatz of a sex life that is provided by commercial erotica.  And
they've all got ADSL at home nowadays ;-)

                                        Juliusz