[plug] LTSP - Linux Terminal Server Project - LiveCD?

[Gavin Chester]

CAVEAT:
I'm passing on info gleaned from lurking on other lists rather than
having first-hand experience.  That said ... 

On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 16:50, Onno Benschop wrote:
> Does anyone know of a live-cd version of LTSP that will run the server
> off a live-cd and perhaps allow me to create some floppies to configure
> some etherboot clients?

Part 1/ Knoppix, for one has a LTSP mode, whereby one PC is booted as
the server and the others on the network booted thereafter are picked up
as clients.  Search for it on the web or at the Knoppix site.  

Part 2/ Identify your network cards in the clients and then go to
rom-o-matic http://rom-o-matic.net/ to get the etherboot image for
putting on the floppies.
> 
> I've come into a small town where the local community college is a
> little under-funded and their hardware consists of 8 x Pentium 120
> machines with 16Mb of RAM.

Sadly, they are of marginal use even as thin clients with only 16Mb of
RAM.  Reportedly it is possible if you activate NFS swap space to
overcome the client RAM.  I hope that is the correct advice because I'm
going from memory, so I suggest you search the K12LTSP mailing list
archives where this aspect has been discussed many times. Basically,
16Mb is not enough for KDE or Gnome without swap.  I presume they would
have 72pin RAM chips - you could track some down from PC salvage outlets
and then you would see better performance from those PCs as clients.

Alternatively, you could get away with those PCs with a very light
window manager, such as IceWM or XFCE.     
 
> I can bring in my desktop to act as a server, but I'd rather not subject
> my hard-disk content to the class room.
> 
> Any other suggestions will also be accepted.

If using your PC really is the cheapest best option avail. to give some
server capacity, why not put in a spare disk and configure that with
everything needed to be the terminal server.  Then use Grub to choose to
boot to that disk when you want to act as a terminal server and your own
disk when it isn't.  Simpler still, put your two disks each in a caddy
to make them removable so that you can easily pop out your hard disk and
put in the alternative terminal server hard disk when needed.  That way
your data is physically removed from the PC.  Even if you had to buy a
new hard disk and the two caddys you would spend only around $100 total.
> 
> One machine even has 64Mb of RAM, and it even booted Knoppix - mostly,
> but it was pretty unbearable. The other machines fail to boot off a CD
> at all, even if BIOS is set to boot from CD first.
> 
> Suggestions welcomed,
> 
Using a boot floppy should then allow you to have Knoppix start off the
CD.  Knoppix has the option of putting boot config. files on a floppy
anyway, so it is a supported option.  I found that many reluctant CD
boots had to be overcome by use of floppy first.  

HTH

Regards, Gavin