-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 There are other issues in the works here, too. You can get away with running LTSP (via NFS obviously) on a 386 with only 8MB of RAM. There's almost no way to get X into a 2MB compressed ramdisk. This is necessary because when all is said and done, the Linux kernel is downloaded into RAM (about 1 - 2 MB), then the initial ramdisk is downloaded which is somewhere around 2MB. The ramdisk contents in memory are then copied into a ramdisk proper and the ramdisk contents freed. This requires a total of 6MB to work properly. When I tried to work with a 3MB initial ramdisk image on the above machine, it failed to boot as it was copying the ramdisk contents from memory into the ramdisk device (which is also in memory, obviously). This of course poses a problem that cannot be solved without installing more memory. And this was using NFS for portions of the root filesystem. If you have the memory (i.e., 64MB or more), you can easily come up with a fully functional initial ramdisk image to run the workstation from with all the nice functionality you want. If you use a compressed RAM filesystem, you can get away with having around 60-64MB of file storage in your filesystem that runs the workstation in memory depending on the compression ratio you achieve. I usually get around 2:1 compression, but generally a little less. This allows for you to successfully have a filesystem that is slightly less than the entire size of the amount of RAM you have in the system (assuming you want to share the RAM evenly). If you determine that you need less RAM to run the apps the workstation will be using (say 16MB), then of course you can increase the amount of files and storage your initial ramdisk uses (i.e., 48MB) which gives you an effective filesystem size of 48MB * 2 = 96MB <--- !!! greater than the physical size of memory you have installed. Pretty neat! 16MB should be plenty to run X windows with a remotely displayed VNC desktop. You might be able to get away with a remote XDMCP session running a lightweight window manager and very (and I mean very) few windows/applications open. Unless you were to implement swap space, your XDMCP session will crash a lot on you unexpectedly, simply because the workstation will run out of memory that X needs to cache things and the kernel will kill of processes to free resources and X is usually the one that gets it.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Antonio R. Barbado Portillo wrote: > >> In Netstation project , thin clients boot about RAMDISK INITRD only. >> Why LTSP do not take this feature??? A real thin client not need a FS >> and not run local app. This feature is better or no? Its more effective. > > > Unless I'm mistaken, LTSP does use initrd, which most certainly does > contain a file system. Clients do need to run at least one app locally > (after all the boot-up scripts in initrd), either telnet or an X server. > Since the executables are in files, a file system is required. Since all > the files involved total to a sizable amount, they are not stored on a > diskless client. Instead, they are stored on a server, so the Network > File System is used to access them. > > I'm sure something other than NFS could be used, but whatever it was > would have to solve the same problem of providing a file system over a > network. > - -- Jason A. Pattie [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQE9pZw5uYsUrHkpYtARAntUAJ0XNw7E9x/O5/SVB56kMsWBManOmwCfXB1/ UXRoIxiRgr75CuynBl/4oO4= =EW12 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.openprojects.net
