I thought I'd mention an experience I had recently with an LTSP client.
I was using an HP Brio box with onboard video.
I was experiencing problems where the video would show inverted colored
question marks and various other symbols on the screen in "character
mode". It seemed about as frequent as a screen saver would kick in.
Sure enough, I went into the bios of the machine and disabled the power
saving features for both video and the hard drive to that they "never"
kick in and now the video seems as stable as ever.
I have the machine's stanza in ltsp.conf set with screen_01=startx,
screen_02=startx, screen_03=shell. When the machine would display the
wierd question marks, I would switch to terminal 3, 2 and 1. At one
point I seemed to have both X window displays active at the same time,
with two mice tracking about 40 pixels apart on the screen one above the
other. It was really bizzare phenomen. I've also ran this machine with
a matrox PCI video card. When the system would boot ltsp with a video
driver identified as "auto" in ltsp.conf the X windows auto
configuration would fail. I had to specify mga to get it to work. I
had the ? characters in the character mode appearing on the screen there
from time to time as well.
Time will tell, but I think with the power saving options turned off in
the bios this terminal will work in a very stable fashion from now on.
I had given up my thin client station to a laptop user who's hard drive
crashed. So now we have one more Linux thin client user running today :)
I wanted to make sure he would be up and running with a stable, workable
solution. So what I've learned is that you may want to use a thin
client for a couple of days yourself before deploying it to an end user
so you can work out all the possible quirks first and give the user a
top notch, trouble free experience with LTSP. I also let the user have
my Flat Pannel LCD monitor as well while his laptop is rebuilt from
scratch. He likes it very much.
Could all this powersaving have also been addressed by passing something
like noacpi on some sort of kernel options line in lts.conf?
LTSP 4.1.1
Kernel 2.4.26-ltsp-2
Integrated Video: Intel 82810 Graphics Controller.
-Joe Baker
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