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sacred_harlot's recently, i set up a Linux terminal by using software provided by the Linux Terminal Server Project. i have nothing but praise for this project. Basically, it allows one to set up a Linux box without having to actually install anything on the box's hard disk.
Originally, i had planned to install Linux on this box's hard disk, alongside Windows XP. The hard disk has 16G free on it, so there was ample space for Linux to be installed. It wasn't to be, however, for two reasons:
Cue LTSP. i made a boot floppy which allows one to boot via the network. A DHCP request is sent to the LTSP server, which not only allocates an IP address to the box, but also transfers a Linux kernel to the box via TFTP. After the kernel has booted, it mounts, via NFS, an LTSP-specific root filesystem, together with the /home directory of the server. Finally, it presents a login screen - possibly graphical - to the user, from which the user can log in as though they're logging in on the server box, and use any apps and data that are available to them on that box. The LTSP client doesn't do any processing apart from the graphical processing needed to display things on the screen.
In this specific situation,sacred_harlot's laptop is the server, and a desktop machine is the client . . . . sacred_harlot's household now has two computers available for use. :-)
The Linux Terminal Server Project is awesome. :-)
1. More specifically, a floppy containing tomsrtbt, which is a very handy thing to have around. :-)
sacred_harlot's recently, i set up a Linux terminal by using software provided by the Linux Terminal Server Project. i have nothing but praise for this project. Basically, it allows one to set up a Linux box without having to actually install anything on the box's hard disk.Originally, i had planned to install Linux on this box's hard disk, alongside Windows XP. The hard disk has 16G free on it, so there was ample space for Linux to be installed. It wasn't to be, however, for two reasons:
- The hard disk controller seems to be flaky, which means that it's sometimes visible to the BIOS, and sometimes not. Although i suspect that it's something to do with Windows; the problem only occurs after i've tried to boot Windows (which suddenly resets mid-load), and didn't seem to occur after doing a cold boot of Linux from a floppy1.
- Even if this wasn't a problem, the fact that Windows doesn't give a hoot about effective disk space usage means that, bizarrely, there is insufficient contiguous free disk space to create a partition for Linux, even though there is 16G free! i did a disk defrag, but that made little difference: the files were spread from one end of the disk to the other. :-/
Cue LTSP. i made a boot floppy which allows one to boot via the network. A DHCP request is sent to the LTSP server, which not only allocates an IP address to the box, but also transfers a Linux kernel to the box via TFTP. After the kernel has booted, it mounts, via NFS, an LTSP-specific root filesystem, together with the /home directory of the server. Finally, it presents a login screen - possibly graphical - to the user, from which the user can log in as though they're logging in on the server box, and use any apps and data that are available to them on that box. The LTSP client doesn't do any processing apart from the graphical processing needed to display things on the screen.
In this specific situation,
sacred_harlot's laptop is the server, and a desktop machine is the client . . . . sacred_harlot's household now has two computers available for use. :-)The Linux Terminal Server Project is awesome. :-)
1. More specifically, a floppy containing tomsrtbt, which is a very handy thing to have around. :-)
