Clients, stand-alone & simple networked systems
The following table lists the basic hardware requirements for
disk based clients, stand-alone systems, simple networked
systems and diskless clients.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Disk based client,
stand-alone, simple network Diskless client
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Minimum RAM 4 MB 4 MB
Recommended RAM 8 MB 8 MB
Minimum hard disk 80 MB n/a
LAN optional Ethernet
WAN optional n/a
Floppy disk installation only optional
These types of systems are intelligent data collection/processing
points such as POS tills and network computers
based on the Intel 386, 486 or Pentium microprocessor.
They can all operate with a minimum of 4MB of RAM
although 8MB is recommended. In cases where only the minimum
amount of RAM is installed, the UNIX kernel limits
itself to a known amount of memory, and what is left is free for
use by the application. Memory requirements are described in
greater detail in
``Minimized system footprint''.
The default console type for these systems is VGA, however, SCO OpenServer Release 5.0 console types are supported and can be configured instead of the default. These console types include EGA, CGA and consoleless.
Specialized peripherals such as printers, scanners and so on, can be supported through user-configurable serial and parallel ports. Others can also be supported through specialized I/O adapters and third party drivers.
LAN adapters are optional in all systems except diskless clients. The diskless client requires the LAN adapter and the connection it provides to be able to boot. Diskless clients boot across Ethernet using the BOOTP and TFTP protocols. The supported networking adapters are listed in ``Supported networking adapters''. In addition, no permanent file storage is provided locally (see ``Network- and server-independent operations'') although temporary file storage can be provided by using an in-memory filesystem.