Funny that for a week or so I have had in mind writing a note exaclty about
that subject. It was to bear as sub-title "the many ways to mess up lts.conf".
Maybe Peter's issue is related to mine, maybe not. Anyways, here is my story:
For most people, LTSP seems to work right out of the box. Other people tend to
mess up things and should, according to some of the first kind people, be best
kept inside a box. Being a noob at LTSP, kind of a noob at Linux, I may myself
fall into the second category.
I have had LTSP5 running on Ubuntu 8.04 for about half a year now in two test
set-ups, both in a kind of beta-state. One at our high-school for the students
to experiment, the other at home for my kids to work. Both set-ups have been
running more or less as expected.
However, I never seemed to quite understand the effect of lts.conf. No changes
seemed to make any difference whatsoever. Since LTSP basically worked well (not
quite out of the box with me, of course, but only after some erratic trial and
error which usually resulted in going back to the out-of-the-box state again
...) it was unclear if I had misunderstood the commands, if my version did not
support those options or if my hardware set-up did actually include speakers,
for example.
The urge for investigating the later type of question came when one LCD screen
simply would not work at all because of some erronoeus hardware detection by
Xorg. (I bothered everybody on this mailing list with the issue two weeks ago.
I have kept quiet since then for good reason as shall be clear.) Similarly, I
could not get any better display resolution than 800x600 when connecting via
VirtualBox from my laptop.
I spent one full evening frantically switching on and off every possible
combination of X-settings in lts.conf, googleing for "lts.conf ignored",
"lts.conf not read", "lts.conf not working", re-booting the server, re-building
the LTS image from scratch etc. "Already" in the third round of such mostly
fruitless search, I stumbled over an article in some mailing list archives. It
spoke to me the following way:
"Listen stupid, if you copy files from one test set-up to another, then you
better make sure you set the permissions right. lts.conf needs permissions
0640. Now go back into your box!"
Hurray! Of course, the permissions were set wrong, and the rest of the evening
I spent happily watching the thin clients at home boot up with color depth 2, 4
or 8, with 1024x768 via virtualbox, auto log-in (that made it impossible to
turn off the machine, which presumably is normal behavior) etc.
The next afternoon at work, I happily went straight to the other test set-up,
changed everything in lts.conf to get that one monitor working, re-set the
permissions -- and watched the thin client boot up without any noticeable
changes. That is, not boot up on that display.
An evening similar to the previous ones followed before I began some real
trouble shooting.
As it turned out, some daemon (I believe it was tftp forced to
increased verbosity) revealed that it could not access an Xorg.conf file that I
had provided (or was it lts.conf itself?). The
rest of the evening I spent frantically switching on and off every
possible option in the whole system to allow access to that file which was
right at the same place as lts.conf.
The final evening of this saga saw me digging deeply into my logical thinking
tool box (but not before I had re-built the whole LTSP image from scratch
again). Some struck of genius in the form of yet another article in a mailing
list archive (I believe it actually was ltsp-discuss) spoke to me:
"Listen stupid, if you have your ltsp chroot under /var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/i386/
then it is no good putting your lts.conf or anything under
/var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/, even if some tutorials tell you to do so. Now go back
into your box!"
Ever since then I have been watching happily all thin clients boot up with
color depth 2, 4, 8, 16 or 24 depending on the time of day and my state of
mind.
So for all my fellows from inside the box, I hope to have saved some hours of
your time. All the knowledgeable people participating in ltsp-discuss or even
the developping of LTSP I thank with all my heart for the high quality work
they provide to my kind of people inside the box.
Cheers!
= = = = = = = = =
Stefan Müller Wildi
Unterhof 5
CH-6208 Oberkirch
-----Textnachricht folgt-----
I have an unforeseen problem: My lts.conf is not loaded. We have a
server for testing which uses the standard configuration and another
server on which users' clients load the images etc. On the test server
the lts.conf is loaded normally. It is located in
/var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/i386. Nothing special.
On the other server we've got it in /tftboot/ltsp50/. Clients boot
normally from both servers which means the dhcp-configuration can't be
that wrong. Is there anything I can do: E.g. on the dhcp so the
lts.conf is going to be loaded?
Thanks
Peter
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