An excellentarticle
on PXE+grub - which I believe is an alternative to pxelinux.
I picked up a $150 "eBox", which is a very small, low power drain,
nearly silent computer good for thin clients and dedicated server
applications.
Alex of NACS was kind enough to rig a power adapter for me to use
on it, because it arrived with UK/Hong Kong power plug. :)
Thanks Alex!
I tried to boot unadorned LTSP on it, but I'm getting an error
that others have seen and bailed on the hardware over. I
attempted to use some kernel options that someone said might help,
but they just didn't...
The actual error conditions are/were:
It DHCP's, and tftp's a kernel and initrd
The kernel starts running
The kernel fails to make its root filesystem the ramdisk from
the initrd, with the following message: "Kernel panic: VFS: Unable
to mount root fs on 01:00.
I actually had to rdev the kernel (which is deprecated now) to
get it to try the ramdisk device, because for whatever reason,
specifying "root=/dev/ram0" and similar were failing (with much
the same error, though it wanted to mount an IDE disk at first,
prior to the rdev).
I'm building a (Linus) 2.6.10 kernel now, planning to try that
with a minimally-modified LTSP tree. However, it did not help.
So I decided to try replacing pxelinux with pxegrub - and now
it's working much better. :)
I poked around with some non-X11 vnc viewers, but I'm beginning
to think the best thing to do is to just add encrypted VNC support
to LTSP.
Jan 17, 2005: Back to LTSP... I've got a VNC client working with
LTSP... But I still really want encryption!
Sounds
like a really cool way of waking up your thin client in the morning, so
you don't have to wait for it to boot.
