Klaus Knopper wrote:
On Wed, Jul 05, 2006 at 09:25:22AM +0200, Michael Creel wrote:One thing that really distinguishes Knoppix in my opinion is the fat client terminal server. It's amazing that this has been around for 3 years or so, and no "major" distros have similar functionality yet. There is some talk in Ubuntu circles of making this happen in the next version. Getting a fat client server to work both from a live CD and from an installed version would be pretty useful.Our knoppix-terminalserver script should work in Ubuntu as well, concerning the live CD/DVD. For running it from an installed version, there are several changes necessary, since the script is designed to export the compressed filesystem, and not an already unpacked system. Regards -Klaus Knopper
I have played around a bit with running the a modified version of the knoppix-terminalserver script from a remaster of the Kubuntu live CD. Some packages need to be added (dialog, xdialog, dhcp3-server, tftpd-hpa, syslinux, nfs-kernel-server and maybe some others). Even after this, kubuntu seems to not like double quotes and parentheses in scripts. I don't know what's going on there, haven't had time to check much yet. All in all, I find that Knoppix works better as a live CD, and that adapting the terminal server script is a little more complicated than I imagined it would be. I'm sure that a good bash scripter would get it going quickly, but hey, it already works in Knoppix.
The innovative part of the Ubuntu project is that they seem to plan to make a fat client terminal server work after the distro is installed. It seems that Mandrake has (had) something like this working, but I find few references:
http://dir.filewatcher.com/d/Mandrake/10.1/noarch/Networking/Other/terminal-server-1.5-20mdk.noarch.rpm.31710.htmlI understand that making the knoppix-terminalserver work after installation to HD would require some configuration along the lines of https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DisklessUbuntuHowto
This looks pretty easy to do. It seems to me that the big issue would be making things reasonably secure. It would be nice to have a general Debian package to do this. (whine, whine).
Where did you happen to get the idea for the knoppix-terminalserver, if you don't mind my asking? That was a great idea - remarkably functional.
M.