Multiply your Linux desktop system

From...

June 7, 2000
Web posted at: 10:49 a.m. EDT (1449 GMT)

by Joshua Drake

(IDG) -- The Maxspeed +One Station is an easy way to get a single Linux machine to serve as multiple machines. With this product, a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, you can instantly turn one machine into two or more. This is similar to the idea of using X terminals with Linux; however, an X terminal will run you at least $600 (without a monitor) for a decent model. The +One Station has a suggested retail of $199 and does not require X to run applications.

Maxspeed is a hardware vendor specializing in networking devices; its offerings include Universal Terminal and Maxspeed WBT. To date, all of its products have been terminal based, using either a proprietary interface card or a standard network card. The +One Station is a new venture for Maxspeed, as the product is aimed at the consumer or small business market and is very inexpensive.

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The +One Station hardware itself is very small, measuring about one and a half by three inches, and is labeled for ease of peripheral connectivity. The box contains the +One Station, the proprietary interface card, a 25-inch Cat 5 cable, a quick start guide, a CD with Linux drivers, and a manual. The box itself is complete and is what you would expect from a standard retail product. The interface card has a Cirrus Logic 3D chip set on it and really just looks like a video card. It is PCI-based, so finding a slot in most newer computers should not be difficult.

Installation and configuration

Installing the +One Station is no more difficult than installing any other device, although the process may seem a little backwards: first you install the driver, then you install the hardware. Running Red Hat 6.1, I inserted the software CD into my CD drive. (I use automount, so that was the only thing I had to do to get the CD mounted.) After entering the cd directory as root, I typed ./mxpsetup and the program started automatically.

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The product requires you to relink (Linux-speak for recompile) the kernel. On my machine (a K6-2/300 with 64 MB of RAM), the process took about ten minutes and went without a hitch. When it finishes recompiling, the software tells you the recompile has been completed and asks you to reboot the machine to have the patch take effect. The documentation neglects to tell you that you should also install the controller card at this point. After I shut down and powered down the machine, I proceeded to install the card. A couple of minutes later, my machine was booting back up.

On the reboot, one of the first items I noticed was that the software had correctly reconfigured LILO so that the new kernel would boot first. Not only did it reconfigure LILO correctly, it also preserved my existing configuration in case of some failure. This was a welcome surprise, and something that less technical Linux users will appreciate. As the machine is booting up, you will see two lines detecting the hardware you just installed. When the machine has booted fully, you can log into Linux as root and administer the driver by typing +oneadm.

After booting up, I connected the RJ-45 cable to the new card and then to the little +One Station. I then connected my second keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Once everything was connected, I pressed the space bar twice and (behold!) a login prompt presented itself on the second screen. So far, this installation had been going much more smoothly than I had expected. After logging in on the second screen as root, I ran the +oneadm program to configure X for the new screen. It asked a couple of questions about my configuration, and then configured X to run on both devices. Once I finished with the configuration, I typed mstartx at the prompt, and violˆ! X started on the second screen.

System requirements and features

+One Console has opened a whole new level of opportunity for my household. All of a sudden my wife and son do not need a second computer, as I can just let them log in to the second screen and run a console (my wife likes Pine) or X (my son prefers Netscape).

Many of you may be asking yourselves about crowded desk space or low resources on your computer. The former shouldn't be much of a concern, as the device allows you to go up to 50 feet with a standard RJ-45 cable. Fifty feet is long enough in my house to drop down from the upper to the lower floor.

Resources would be the larger concern for most people. For example, Netscape is, well, a pig. It's a very clumsy one at that, and it can cause a great deal of havoc for a machine. My machine, with its 64 MB of RAM, ran just fine with an X session on one screen and a console session on the other. If you would like to run two X sessions, I would suggest that you have no less than 128 MB of RAM. I upgraded my computer to 128 MB and had no problems running multiple X sessions, with my wife on one screen and myself on the other.

There are some unique features Maxspeed claims this device has that I was not able to try, including the ability to use multiple cards per machine and multiple cards per rack. Maxspeed says that, with an expansion cabinet, you can run up to 16 +One Stations. With its existing configuration, my computer could handle a total of three. This is still four workstations for the price of one reasonably configured machine from Dell or VA Linux. It is also nice to know that the card will support 1,280 by 1,024 pixel display, although at that level the refresh rate was too low to see the text easily. It will also run at 1,024 by 768 pixels at 75 MHz, which is a very decent resolution.

Some disappointments

After running the device for a couple of hours, I started to encounter some problems. The machine would instantaneously lock up. At first I thought the entire system had locked up, but after some initial diagnostics I found that the problems only arose when running X. Also, when the machine did lock up, I was able to get in with the second screen and kill X, and the machine would come back. To Maxspeed's credit, the manual does include a troubleshooting section, and I was able to stabilize the device by attempting several of the options provided. The only complaint that I have about troubleshooting is that it requires powering down the machine each time. It would be nice if there were a module switch or administration switch that enabled you to just reinitialize the driver.

The product's documentation, although helpful, is very sparse and may present problems to less technical Linux users. If you want to use this product without frustration and you are not a technical user, I strongly suggest asking a colleague or friend for help with setting it up.

The documentation only covers the Red Hat distribution, and although Red Hat currently has the majority market share, this is changing rapidly. Corel has managed to snag just about 20 percent of the Linux retail market in less than a year. Since the +One Station is geared towards Corel's target market of consumer and business desktop users, Maxspeed may want to update its documentation or its product to effectively make use of this distribution.

Another negative is the necessity of recompiling the kernel. If companies such as Maxspeed truly want to grab market share, they must make it easier than this for customers, even if it means submitting the driver to the kernel source tree for inclusion in all kernels. That alone would allow distributions to package the driver in module format. In the case of Red Hat, the driver could be configured with Kudzu, Red Hat's plug and play utility.

For its price, +One Station is the best second machine you can purchase. I was able to create a second computing environment for my family for the cost of the +One Station, a 15-inch monitor, and a mouse and keyboard -- a grand total of $330.

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