Improved fonts on ThinkNIC and LTSP

Feb 22, 2002 -jam-

Recently, there has been alot of chatter on the LTSP and K12 mailing lists about the fonts on the ThinkNIC computer when used with LTSP. A comment was made, that when the ThinkNIC boots from the CD, the fonts are better. So, I grabbed the CD iso image from the NIC site and took a look at how they did it.

It turns out that the ThinkNIC CD uses a different Xserver. They are using the Xvesa Xserver which is part of the XFree86 Xkdrive/TinyX package.

I built a new Xvesa Xserver package that can be installed on an LTSP server that will clear up the blurry fonts/graphics problems.

The package is available on the LTSP.org download page and it is called ltsp_x_xvesa-3.0.0-i386.tgz

Currently, the package is only available in TGZ format, as the package includes a replacement of the rc.local script which is normally part of the ltsp_core package. RPMS are not supposed to replace files that belong to other packages, therefore I didn't build the rpm.

Installation is fairly straight forward:

  1. Save a backup copy of your /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/rc.local file

  2. Install the ltsp_x_xvesa-3.0.0-i386.tgz package

  3. Change the XSERVER entry in the lts.conf file to this:
       XSERVER = Xvesa
  4. Reboot the workstation

If you need help with this, please post your messages to the ltsp-discuss mailing list or visit the #ltsp IRC channel at irc.freenode.net

Jim McQuillan jam@Ltsp.org