Hello all! I stumbled upon the Acer Aspire One Netbook as a prime candidate for our use in a school environment. Before I go about describing the problems, maybe some of you are interested in reading the backgrounds.
I have been researching the possiblity of having all students of our school equipped with their own (cheap, small, silent) laptop device. It should be light enough to be taken home, simple in technology (no quadcore/150gb per person-overkill), small form factor for use in class (no 18" wide-screen), usable keyboard, silent (again: NO quadcores) and modest in battery consumption. The Acer One notebook with Linpus Linux and 8gb SSD meets most of these criteria very well. Its start up time is really impressive, too. So each student could buy such a device. Some students will have their own machines which they may want to use. So when used in class -- the laptops should be hooked up as a thin client in order to assure that everyone has the same (functional!) environment. So nobody has to take care of the machines' support as long as they can boot. As possible extension, I would like to study how far these machines are suitable as fat clients. This is how far my project idea has come. For when I started testing, the netbook refused the PXE-booting. The error messages on terminal 1 were: > Clocksource tsc unstable (delta = -[2^32 -1]ns) > Time: hpet clocksource has been installed > NET: Registered protocol familiy 17 > ipconfig: eth0: SIOCGIF INDEX: No such device > ipconfig: no devices to configure > /init: .: 1: Can't open /tmp/net-eth0.conf > Kernel panic / not syncing: Attempted to kill init! Switching back to terminal 7 or 8 (the graphical login screen) I read: > nbd-event [1500]: run_program: '/sbin/modprobe' abnormal exit After several hours of reasearch first on the clocksource issue (which turned out to be harmless and easy to fix; simply add clocksource=hpet in pxelinux.cfg/default - interesting what all one learns during such trouble shooting sessions!) it turned out that there must be an issue with the Realtek RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller. As far as I understand the following bug report in Launchpad point to the fact that some kernels do not handle that NIC well (https://bugs.launchpad.net/openvz-kernel/+bug/225749). The on-board Linpus Linux uses kernel 2.6.23.9lw. The server uses Kernel 2.6.24-23-generic with LTSP5 on Ubuntu 8.04. So off i go and update the kernel in the chroot /opt/ltsp/i386 to 2.6.24-23-generic as well. I think it used to be 2.6.24-16-generic. At least that is what I see in /var/lib/tftboot/ltsp/i386 pointed to by nbi.img.old. (So the above error messages are with that kernel.) I seem to manage, at least my Pentium IIIs still boot. The error message has changed, though. It ends in a kernel panic as well but the error message is different. So much different that I do not see any starting point for the trouble shooting. I put screen shots on my blog (http://kszsm.ch.vu/ -> Varia). If somebody knowledgeable could have a look at them I would be very grateful! As far as I understand, the problem is not LTSP-specific. A possible solution however, should work in the LTSP-setting. Neither is within my limited reach. I understood that the rtl8102 module somehow is the trouble maker. Some sources suggested adding this module to the initram which I tried in the chroot but -- not knowing at all what I was doing -- could not see any hope in, so I abandoned it. My questions: 1.) Does anybody have similar troubles with the Acer Aspire One netbook used as a thin client? Does anybody have it working like it should? In what setting? 2.) Does anybody see a good starting point to solve these problems? Am I completely missing something? 3.) If it was the rtl8102 module, how could I get it into the chrooted image/kernel/whatever? Your help is very much appreciated, thank you! = = = = = = = = = Stefan Müller Wildi Unterhof 5 CH-6208 Oberkirch +41 41/920 3336 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _____________________________________________________________________ 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
