[LUAU] LTSP thin client knoppix variant idea?

[Julian Yap]

Hi Dave,

I'm not LTSP guru just yet so someone correct me if I'm wrong.

An option you have if you don't want to add a Boot ROM to the
NIC or use a PXE NIC is to use a boot floppy.  Most old machines
you are talking about would come with a floppy drive.

A pre-existing floppy drive and a pre-existing network card is
cheaper than a new CDROM/PXE NIC.

Here's what it looks like:
http://www.hosef.org/gallery2/v/exhibitions/dscf0253.jpg.html

With some instructions:
http://www.hosef.org/wiki/Testing_the_client_--_preparing_a_boot_floppy
http://www.hosef.org/wiki/CreateEtherBootDisk

So yes.  I'm not sure if you've considered that option. :P

Mahalo,
Julian

--- Dave Burns <tburns at hawaii.edu> wrote:
> Good point, but the LSTP stuff has to work with older
> hardware, I'm not sure
> we're improving things if we use up 700MB of RAM with disk
> image.
> 
> The reason this idea appealed to me was that a while back PXE
> NICs weren't
> all that common so when we were setting up a lab we had to put
> in several
> new NICs. A CD is cheaper than a NIC, but a CD drive is not.
> But lots of the
> out-tossed computers we were looking at had CD drives already.
> Not so many
> had 1GB+ of RAM.
> 
> I guess if all you want to do is run a thin client with a
> cheap NIC, you
> could use the CD (or memory stick) just to boot & then act
> like the other
> net-booted clients. No big advantage, but a little extra
> flexibility (at the
> cost of extra complexity).
> 
> Dave
> 
> > Boot, fetch the entire filesystem into memory, write the
> precious
> > parts back as needed (config changes, etc).
> >
> >
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