hi please add this to the installation of clients: i hope your policy accepts incomplete documentation where work still needs to be done :-) but i think this should be mentioned in the documentation as it was and is a very nice trick we do here in our installation.
chapter 3.2.5 booting from harddrive or ide-flash harddrive: instead of using potentially unreliable floppy disks you also have the option to use an ide-flash device or the old built-in harddrive of your terminal. also maybe you don't like the idea that anyone could just plug in a different floppy disk. in my installation i had 10 terminals just running on the old harddrive they had used for windows 98 before. i had to change no hardware at all, just some installation and there we go. later i noticed that the harddrives are too loud and i could replace them by ide-flash devices. so on every machine i removed all disks and replaced them by cheap ide-flash devices. ide-flash devices are a pseudo ide harddisk. you can get them in sizes down to 10 megabytes which i like to use for LTSP. you plug it directly into the IDE Socket of the mainboard and its not much bigger than the socket itself. this way you can convert old hardware into ltsp capable hardware without bothering with new network interface cards or bootroms. get a grub boot cdrom from the grub homepage. it's just a small ISO image. burn it onto a CD-ROM. install a FAT filesystem (or reuse the existing one) on the ide flash device or harddisk. create a directory "/boot" and a directory "/boot/grub" copy the files stage1 and stage2 from the grub CD-ROM to "/boot/grub" on the ide flash device or harddisk. choose the correct etherboot image from http://www.rom-o-matic.net/. Make sure you select ".zlilo" as output format. save this file to "/boot/grub/etherboot.zlilo" on the ide flash device or harddisk. create the file "/boot/grub/menu.lst" on the ide flash device or harddisk with the following content: timeout 0 title ltsp root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/grub/etherboot.zlilo now you have to install grub into the master boot record. therefore you have to install a CD-ROM Drive to secondary IDE and the harddrive or ide-flash device to primary IDE. you can remove all other drive devices from the computer. put the grub cdrom into the drive and reboot. when the grub prompt appears type: root (hd0,0) setup (hd0) you should see messages telling you that stage1 and stage2 are installed. remove the cdrom, reboot the machine. it should boot from the ide flash or harddrive, there should flash some messages about grub loading stage1 and stage2 and then etherboot should load. from there on everything works like if you had installed the etherboot image into a real local bootrom. note: if you have some other operating system installed locally (like windows 98), you can use it's own FAT filesystem and just create the files and directories as described above. you can then add a line for loading windows98 in the menu.lst file (see grub documentation). also you can remove the "timeout 0" line and then you can dualboot between windows 98 and LTSP. this may seem useless, but in my scenario i could work on all PCs to get LTSP running one after another. it took me a day or so because of different graphic hardware and such. when done with a pc, it could go on running windows 98. then on the day of decision, i just had to edit all menu.lst files on the PCs to make LTSP the default boot instead of win98 and this way i could switch to LTSP from win98 in very low time and low risk. if something failes, i could go back to win98. then some months later i decided to replace the harddisks with ide-flash and this way completely remove all win98. cya erik -- Erik Thiele ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _____________________________________________________________________ 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.freenode.net
