>> ... this is an old iMac that cannot do PXE and I have been looking
>> for an alternative solution.
>
> I happened to have one where Windows was installed. So I followed the
> instructions from
> http://www.tomhenson.com/it-technical-help/mac-pxe-boot-citrix-provisioning-services
> I.e., use Grub4DOS and gPXE.
Thanks, that looks great but I have a powerpc, iMac G4 :(
Anyway, I SOLVED IT!!!
These are the steps, in case somebody else has the same problem (having
a non-i386 computer that doesn't know how to boot pxe but has a working
Debian system with X and network). I also had the DHCP out of my
control and the battery is dead so I couldn't set the default boot
device to use bootp either).
Disclaimer: Keep in mind that that is not the way the packages should
be used. I'm not completely sure that a 'purge' will leave your system
as it was before. You can also try a chroot environment with
debootstrap or something like that to be on the safer side.
1. cheat :). Create a file named "/etc/ltsp_chroot" ('touch' is enough)
2. install the package ltsp-client-core, since it only checks if the
file ltsp_chroot exists the installation will finish without complaining.
3. by now you will have many hooks into the kernel and your initrd. You
don't want those because you will not be able to boot normally and
because you want to use the client environment on your disk. So you
have to "disable" the following files:
dpkg -L ltsp-client-core|egrep 'initramfs|kernel'
in order to disable them you have to see if they need to be commented
out or if you have to add an 'exit 0' after the shebang (#!/bin/...).
4. reconfigure your kernel so that iniramfs gets built *without* the
hooks. If you forget that step, as I did, you can always recover with
an alternative kernel, if you have one, or with finnix.
dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-2.6...-powerpc
5. since you've removed all the autodetection from the LTSP startup
routines you will now have to write a lts.conf with at least these
lines, so that the client knows where the server is:
[default]
SERVER=your.server.ip.address
and make sure you do a ssh from your client (root user) to the server at
least once before you try to do it with LTSP.
That's it. I am looking at it right now. The Ubuntu LTSP server tells
me I changed the default language and during the client boot I see some
errors about operations being done on a read only filesystem. I know
this is a dirty hack, but it works!
Eduardo.
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