Technical Summary

The real basics:

The Nivo has a 100Mb/s ethernet interface. If you're driving many of them from a single PC you may want to use a gigabit-capable card and switch.
The Nivo has no on-board configuration. It will use DHCP. When you power up the Nivo its screen will show its MAC address, and the IP address if it has had a DHCP response.
To create desktop sessions, we currently use a proxy program, nivo2vnc, which connects to a VNC server and displays the output on a Nivo. There's a wrapper script nivomac2vnc which will find a Nivo based on its MAC address to save you allocating a static IP to it.
The current Nivo is capable of standard resolutions up to 1280x1024 at 24-bit depth. You should normally connect to a VNC server running at 1024x768 or 1280x1024. If you have the older Nivo 1 hardware, make sure you read the Nivo 1 page to understand the differences.
The VNC server can be started any way you like, but an easy way to ensure it has a login prompt and a standard environment is to enable XDMCP on gdm.

For more details on any of this, see System Background and System Installation