After I got Etherboot in to my BIOS, it was super-trivial to get a diskless Linux client that ran rdesktop using the stuff provided by the Linux Terminal Server Project.
I downloaded their RPMS and installed them. Nice neat installation
into /opt/ltsp (with kernel in /tftpboot). I ran their
ltsp_initialize script or some such and didn’t have it modify most
of my system files since I wasn’t going to be using the diskless
workstation for X. Opened up the TFTP server, allowed remote logging
(I’m not quite sure this actually worked), modified dhcpd.conf a
bit, and we’re off to the races.
Booting up the client worked first time. Popped me right in to X.
When in runlevel 5, though, you don’t have a console on VC 1 or
anything like that, so I couldn’t start any X clients. Instead I
ended up modifying /etc/rc.local in the diskless client root
(/opt/ltsp/i386) to run rdesktop from /tmp/start_ws, which
is called by init when runlevel 5 is entered.
It’s easy to add parameters to lts.conf too, BTW. Just add your
parameter in whatever section you’d like and just use the get_cfg
program to read it. For example, I created a TERMINAL_SERVER
parameter that I used as an argument to rdesktop.
No problems. A bit of trial and error to fix lil’ problems (don’t
forget to run X in the background in start_ws if you intend to run
an X client after it) and you’re off to the races. A big thank you to
the guys working on LTSP; you’ve done a great job. If anyone wants
more information on what I’ve done or to take a peek at my scripts,
you may mail me.
In other news, I think I’m almost done with my Donnie Darko
soundtrack. I re-ripped a DVD chapter yesterday on darkho’s laptop
since I remembered that her Dell had a DVD drive in it. It’s cool
that you can hot swap the floppy or the DVD drive into a slot.
Installing the DVD utilities I needed was a snap since they’re not
proper packages to begin with and they’re pretty contained into one
directory. I just zipped up my DVD Tools directory and plopped it
down on her laptop. Had to install PowerDVD and ASPI, but that’d have
to be done eventually anyway so she could watch DVDs. I also accessed
the resulting 50MB WAV file over the network (loaded in to Sound
Forge) and let me tell you: it was fast. This give me hope for my
coming IDE RAID array and fast network access.
Before I forget: Sound Forge 6.0 is way useful. I don’t think there were [m]any plug-in changes, and the interface isn’t drastically changed either from what I’ve seen. The big enhancement, though, is speed. Apparently I was wrong and SF 5.0 didn’t have “non-destructive editing.” A friend of mine compared non-destructive editing to the way an RDBMS keeps a journal. It doesn’t modify the file itself, but keeps kind of a journal of what has happened to the file until you save it out to disk. Result? Much faster operations, no creating undo apparently, faster saving, etc. Plus it appears to do most operations in the background now, so you can go work on another file while it’s processing the first, I think. Very nice.
I realized that last night I have no idea what else to work on when
this soundtrack is done. I know I was working on DarkWiki there for a
while, but I constantly have doubts if I’m not wasting my time on
something that’ll never pan out to being a useful piece of software,
if I’ve made the wrong choices, made it too complex — to the
violation of “Wiki principles” — etc. I guess it’s so close to being
done, or at least debugged, that I might as well have a go at it.
Still have to fix interface.pm, though. I think I figured out a
way that’d fix it, but I have to find my notes on it. They’re either
here or in the source file. (I need to link the MT search application
from these pages. Indeed I’ve looked at some of the archive pages
and, for whatever reason, they’re looking damn ugly these days.)
Went to Caribou Coffee last night and
was surprised to sit down right next to a Linksys
WET11.
Set my Cisco to any ESSID and found a cariboueast ESSID. Woo hoo!
Finally a local coffee shop with wireless Internet access. For some
reason, though, I was having serious problems with my Cisco 802.11b
card. I started with my Orinoco card, but took that out when my
system strangely locked up after an attempt to dhcpcd eth1. With
the Cisco card I couldn’t see to get a successful ARP for my gateway.
After setting it statically Internet access seemed to be kind of iffy;
for example, watching Ethereal I was seeing the beginning of an SSH
session, but after that I never saw any packets for it at all. Even
pinging the gateway (a Linksys router/wireless/switch combo I suspect)
I was getting a lot of packet loss. I still don’t know what was
going on, but when I switched back to my Orinoco card everything
worked swimmingly. They’ve apparently installed Road Runner business
class there. Strangely, I didn’t see any mention of the set up
anywhere in the coffee house. Maybe it wasn’t ready for prime-time
yet in their eyes. Or maybe I just wasn’t supposed to be using it.
Oh well! That’ll teach you not to set WEP keys.
Sorry, I didn’t have any chalk on me.