Re: Using old diskless machine as X terminal
On Mon, 2008-12-22 at 22:11 -0500, Celejar wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:03:10 -0500
> "Douglas A. Tutty" <dtutty@vianet.ca> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 11:10:27AM -0800, Ross Boylan wrote:
> > > I have an old machine without a working hard disk that I'd like to use
> > > to connect to my main machine and run X.
> > >
> > > I believe that I could boot off of knoppix, but is there something
> > > easier I could do with the stuff already on my main machine--maybe
> > > setting up an image and transmitting over the network at boot time? The
> > > machine has a CD drive, but I'm not sure it's working.
> > >
> > > If I can use stuff I've already downloaded, it will go faster.
> >
> > If your old box doesn't do (or can't do) network booting, then you'll
> > need to give it some kind of hard bootable image. The problem with
> > knoppix is that it uses so much ram. You could try grml (it may use
> > less ram, I don't know).
>
> Or Debian-live, which is incredibly customizable, although that will
> obviously involve work.
All my options seem to involve work! So far, I've spent a lot of time
with nothing to show.
I misremembered the problem with the old machine; its power supply is
broken (which is why I removed the disks).
I switched to trying to get a 100Mhz Pentium with 64MB of RAM working.
Unfortunately, it can't boot from CD-ROM (maybe something broke--the CD
ROM is still readable, though). Nor does it directly support network
booting. Its disks are basically full; it's running Windows NT 4, but
my other family members are finding it intolerably slow. I was hoping
it would be adequate as an X terminal.
Someone suggested I try smart boot manager on a floppy, to cause a boot
off CD-ROM. But I can't get that to work.
I've seen several suggestions for ways to make diskettes that will
either boot from CD or network.
PXE booting requires an image to transmit. Making the image looks like
another involved project.
There are a bunch of tools packaged for Debian that look relevant (e.g.
search for "boot" in packagesearch (the app, not the web site).
A number of options (such as using those tools or NFS mounting) are
complicated by the fact that my system is too heavyweight for the old
machine, so I need to pare things down so it's only an X server.
Meanwhile I've tweaked Xaccess and kdmrc in /etc/kde3/kdm so that they
might play along if I get the rest working.
Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.
Ross
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