UNIX Desktop Questions & Answers

Customer is wanting to add a second display and keyboard to a unix system.
Sernario:
Medical office has unix system with five dumb terminals, and a VGA/SVGA monitor, PS/2 keyboard. They want to remove one of the dumb terminals and replace with a second VGA/SVGA monitor and keyboard. Can this be done? Will they be able to input from both keyboards at the same time? What kind of hardware would be involved in this process. Is this the right area to ask this question? Thank you for your help.

It is often possible to add a second monitor for a single system under X but I don't think that you are going to be successful with the second keyboard for one system.

Are they wanting to replace the dumb terminal with keyboard and Monitor on the main system for some graphics related reason?

Eye strain is the reason they want to change from DT to VGA.
The program they run is a medical billing program. Data entry is the main thing they do with it.

Now I don't know this for sure yet, but I bet the minute that I get this one installed and working that they will decide to change them all out. Then what? Thin Clients?

How about cheap X-clients?

I see X Terminals on eBay all the time for cheap that support VGA. You might be able to find what you need that works with a decent VGA monitor.

I would look at the X Terminal solution. The only problem with buying off eBay is that you have to make sure that you buy X Terminals that are still supported by the manufacture.

You could also go with cheap PC's running either Unix or Windows with X Client software or VNC.

There are several solutions available, it just depends on how much they want to spend.