RE: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Advice please
looking at the related HOWTO's on thinclient, X terminals etc, there not as straightforward and clear as many of the other documents.
If you have comments on the XDM /X Terminal one - do pass them on - I maintain it :-) This was the first version - so it could do with some feedback. One of the biggest confusions here, is the large number of choices you have. For example, to provide a remote desktop using networked X, you can do any of the following (depending on what equipment you have) : 1. Diskless workstations - see thin client/diskless/etherboot howto 2. Locally booting workstations, with root on a server - see NFS Root/thin client howto 3. Locally booting and running workstations It really depends on how much diskspace you have locally, and what level of future maintainence you want vs how long do you want to take to set it up ?
I am about to (today) do some experimenting with Etherboot/Netboot and booting net kernel images from floppies.
Our Northants group project Angelcynn (constructing a cluster out of junk 486s) involved doing this. I had a system with a server providing root images for each client (mostly using symbolic links) and using a boot floppy for my clients, containing a kernel, built with 'nfsroot', 'rarp' and 'bootp' startup configured. The beowulf stuff had some scripts for creating the rarpd/bootpd server configurations and duplicating the servers filesystem image using symbolic links, providing a directory structure that is mountable via NFS for each client. When I was mucking about with XDM, I didn't bother with this - I just installed a minial SuSE system, in (approx) 200 Mb of local disk - enough to get me to run the networking code and an X server. This was with SuSE 6.3 - which is not easy to scale down. I am told that SuSE 6.4 is more easily scaled - but haven't tried it personally. The RH distros (sorry Roger :-) are quite good at scaling down too - as you can individually select the RPMS on a smaller granularity - but the best is debian or slackware - which you can really chop down to a small size.
A document and/or a workshop on making X terminals from refurbished kit would be really good, and also access to an EPROM burner. Any suggestions here?
Well, like I said, really you are trading off ease of initial setup against ease of maintanance. Personally I see no need to blow eproms - just boot of a floppy if you want diskless workstations (ok - diskless apart from the floppy :-). Is this a problem in the classroom ? A small local harddisk is always useful for swap anyway. The easiest to setup is a local installation on each client - enough to run X. This is also probably the easiest if you have quite a diversity of different hardware - as each PC may need a different X server, etc. This is the hardest to manage though - as you have to maintain each maching individually. The O'Reilly book 'building Linux Clusters' has a CD with some tools for managing large numbers of machines, but this is dedicated more to clusters than X terminals, but I would say the principles are the same. I would certainly contribute (if I could) to anything you have in this area. Like I said - if you want something adding to the XDM X terminal howto - just pass it on. Our last LUG talk was about X, its architecture and using XDM - I demoed my 486 showing my usual desktop from my main machine. I will help if I can, but with a full time job and a very young family, tanking around the country is not so easy at the moment :-) The LUG talk contains some very simple instructions (in conjunction with the XDM/X Terminal howto) on configuring 2 existing machines to share X desktops using XDM - if you have 2 machines - I would start from there. See : http://www.northants.lug.org.uk/ for meeting notes. Kevin.
Well, like I said, really you are trading off ease of initial setup against ease of maintanance. Personally I see no need to blow eproms - just boot of a floppy if you want diskless workstations (ok - diskless apart from the floppy :-). Is this a problem in the classroom ?
You underestimate how distructive children can be :) The few things which kids can stick forign objects in the better!
A small local harddisk is always useful for swap anyway.
Even if you can work out a way to do swap over NFS you probably don't want to do it anway.
The easiest to setup is a local installation on each client - enough to run X. This is also probably the easiest if you have quite a diversity of different hardware - as each PC may need a different X server, etc.
Though Linux handles diverse hardware with rather less fuss than Windows.
The LUG talk contains some very simple instructions (in conjunction with the XDM/X Terminal howto) on configuring 2 existing machines to share X desktops using XDM - if you have 2 machines - I would start from there.
The sort of thing which could work well would be "Sharedware" type hardware. However AFAIK they are still supporting Windows exclusivly. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763
participants (2)
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kevin.taylor@powerconv.alstom.com
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Mark Evans