Changelog
DownloadingThere are several packages that make up the LTSP. Knowing the purpose of each package will help to ensure that you will only be downloading the pieces that you need.There are 4 major groups of packages for LTSP. They are: Core, Linux Kernel, X Windows and Local apps. We broke the packages into groups, because of functionality. Some people wanted to install LTSP and just run character based apps. So, we pulled X windows out of the core. And local apps is an optional feature. Not everybody has workstations that are powerful enough to run apps locally. So, we figured that we'd make the local apps support an optional package. In addition to the major packages described above, there are also some other packages, adding additional features to the LTSP system. InstallingMost of the LTSP packages are available in RPM, TGZ and DEB formats, giving you freedom to choose your installation method. For the RPM and DEB package formats, it's a simple matter of running the RPM or DEB install utility. For the TGZ files, there are a few more steps.RPM: Installing the RPM packages is fairly straight forward.
TGZ: Each of the packages include an INSTALL or README file, describing how to install. Basically, just put the packages in the /tmp directory, and un-tar them. The ltsp_core package has an additional step of running ltsp_initialize to enable the services required for a remote workstation to connect to the server. The ltsp_core package MUST be the first package installed. |
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Core packagesAt a very minimum, you will need to download the ltsp_core and ltsp_kernel packages. This will give you enough to boot the workstation and run a character based Telnet to the server. Basically, a good replacement for a dumb terminal connected via Ethernet.
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Linux Kernel package
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X Windows packagesIf you want to run X Windows (A very good GUI), then you will need to download the X core package. That will give you all of the drivers for XFree86 4.1.0.It is recommended that you also download the X Fonts package. This package has been separated from the X Core package, because some people choose to use an X Font server. A Font server requires some additional configuration on the server, to enable it to serve fonts to a workstation. So, unless you really know what you are doing with X Font Servers, you should probably download the X Fonts package.
Support for older video chipsets If you need one of the XFree86 3.3.6 Xservers, then choose the package you need and download that.
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Local Apps PackagesIf you have a workstation with a bit of horsepower, you can utilize some of that power by running applications locally, on the workstation. A small Pentium, PII, or Celeron based workstation with at least 64mb of ram is a pretty good candidate for running local apps.To run local apps, you will also need to setup NIS (Network Information Services) on the server. You will need that so that when you use rsh to execute the application on the workstation, it will be able to authenticate the user. Currently, the only application package that we have is Netscape. Additional packages are planned in the future, as well as documentation describing how to build local app packages.
Once the Netscape local app package has been installed, you can run it by getting a shell session on the server and running this:
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Miscellaneous PackagesIf you are going to be building your own custom kernels for the workstations, then you will need the ltsp_initrd_kit package. This package contains the scripts and root filesystem hierarchy that makes up the initial ram disk (initrd) that is downloaded along with the kernel, when the workstation boots.There are several utility programs that were written for LTSP, including getltscfg, ltsprtd, pci_scan, prep_swap and startsess. The ltsp_util_src package contains the source code for those utilities.
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Contributed PackagesWebcam packageThe webcam package was created by Andrew Williams. He put together all of the pieces you need, including documentation to connect a Web cam to your workstation and serve up pictures.The ltspsound package was originally created by Boris Reisig, then modified by Andrew Williams to work with the 2.09 series of LTSP. The lts_scanner package was developed by Robert Stanford, to allow you to connect a Scanner to a workstation and scan in documents.
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DHCP setupDuring the installation of the LTSP core package, a samle dhcpd.conf file is installed. It is called /etc/dhcpd.conf.example. If you don't already have a dhcpd.conf file, this sample file can be copied into /etc/dhcpd.conf. Certainly, some modifications will be needed, to make dhcpd work in your environment. Particulary, the MAC address will need to be set, to match that of the workstations. Following is an example dhcpd.conf file:
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ISC DHCP v3.0 or newer (Mandrake)If you are using a version of DHCP from ISC, version 3.0 or newer, then you will need an additional line in the /etc/dhcpd.conf file. The first line of the dhcpd.conf file should be this:
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ISA Network cardsThe LTSP kernels can automatically detect the network card, if it is a PCI card. If it is not, then you have to specify which network card driver to load. And, some ISA network cards also require an IO option to be passed to the module. You can specify the NIC driver and IO address by adding an entry to the individual host section of the dhcpd.conf file. Here's an example for a workstation with an NE2000 network card:
There is a very important thing to notice about the example above. The value specified for option-128 is NOT a mac address. The value e4:45:74:68:00:00 is a special value that Etherboot requires. If it is not there, or is something other than the value above, then all of the other extended options will be ignored by Etherboot. Also, if you are using ISC dhcp, version 3.0 or above, then you need to add a few more lines near the top of the dhcpd.conf file, to define the types of values that will be specified with option 128 and 129. The last 2 lines of the following fragment show how they should be specified:
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