Re: Using old diskless machine as X terminal
On Fri, 2008-12-26 at 23:07 +0100, Hans Ekbrand wrote:
> > I've seen several suggestions for ways to make diskettes that will
> > either boot from CD or network.
>
> http://rom-o-matic.net/ is a useful service here.
I used that, though I suspect it's not quite working. I get to the
point where it tries to grab a file by tftp and then it fails with a
time out.
The server seems to show the request coming in
Dec 23 20:45:00 corn in.tftpd[24442]: RRQ from 192.168.10.21
filename /ltsp/i386/pxelinux.0,
but no response. I *thought* I saw a message indicating the server was
unable to contact the client when it tried to transmit the file, but I
can't find it in the logs now.
Other machines on the network can contact the tftp server and download
the file.
>
> > PXE booting requires an image to transmit. Making the image looks
> like
> > another involved project.
>
> You don't need to create the image yourself, there are ready mades,
> e.g. from LTSP
I used LTSP, though that raised its own issues, of which the 3 most
important were unclear (at least to me) documentation, the fact that it
didn't work with "testing" as a distribution (which is really a
deboostrap issue), and the fact that this is probably more heavyweight
than I need.
It seems LTSP is oriented toward getting each X term to run in it's own
separate environment, whereas all I need is for it to connect to my
display manager (kdm) on the server. By the way, thanks for the tip
about how to set that up. I filed some bugs against ltsp, if anyone
wants more details. The maintainers have been very responsive, which I
appreciate.
I think my main problem is that none of my boot methods are working,
which is really kind of weird.
Ross
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