On Tue, 16 May 2006 23:52:48 -0600 Casey Woods <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> We're well on our way to converting 200+ PCs at my kids school to > LTSP. The administration is really happy with the results so far. A > few teachers are miffed at not being able to run their "essential" > 1996 cd-roms. But they are coming around.... > > One of the big challenges is what to do with the "Windows Laptop Labs" > > that they have put together over the last few years. Most of these > laptops are P2s and P3s with 128MB RAM and (flaky) wireless PCMCIA > cards. They barely run Windows 2000. Most schools don't have a lot > of room for computer labs, so they are forced into buying laptops if > they want more computers in the classroom > > Clearly, network booting them isn't an option so we won't be going > diskless. Any suggestions? > A lot of what people already said got with this, but thought I would give my $.02 In a home environment, I did just this. The laptops have since died, so this description is all off memory. I was give 2 Thinkpad 380Ds (2G HD, 32MB RAM, 133-ish Processors), and two PCMCIA Wireless cards. The things ran Win95 when I got them. The Wireless cards where not "Linux Friendly" (i.e. had to compile drivers from source and the wireless LTSP floppy would not work with them) and the laptops were not "strong" enough to work as stand alone desktop machines (Well, it did, but it was not pretty, and my wife would never use Blackbox, Dillo, Sylphleed, etc) I installed Debian on both of them. As striped down as I could. You only need the basics + the X server (and maybe ESD if you want to). Once you have the laptop running, you can set up autologin to the terminal with some generic user. (Found this - http://linuxgazette.net/issue27/kodis.html - it is not what I used, but looks like it will work). Then in that users .bashrc file, finish it off with call to your desktop script. In my desktop script, I started esd to connect to the LTSP server and then called X with "X -query $SERVER" With this setup I was able to: 1) Use the laptops as "thinclients" 2) Use WEP (or what ever security your router/cards will handle) 3) Use any card that I could get a driver for (via package, kernel or source) 4) Had all system errors on the clients emailed to me on the server (thanks to mail aliases) 5) With a little scripting, I was able to 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' remotely. Even got it to the point where I had one script (~/bin/house_upgrade) that I would launch while sitting at the server, and it would ssh into each of my 3 Debian boxes and run the updates for me. Just ran the command when I know all the boxes were turned on. 6) Used a "pretty boot" kernel on the laptops so they had the nice progress bar during boot. Wife could turn on the laptop, LILO would start (but timed out immediately), see the pretty boot progress, then the laptop would automatically login user "generic", then automatically start "X -query ..." to the LTSP server, and there was the standard LTSP login screen. No interaction needed till the login screen. In your case, if all the machines are the same - you could do it once, then ghost the image to each machine. No need to worry about "missing" CDs and such. -- http://gentgeen.homelinux.org ############################################################# Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for 'tis better to be alone then in bad company. - George Washington, Rules of Civility ------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
