LTSP on Mandriva 2006

Just returned from a client, yet another internet cafe converted to Linux / LTSP solution. Even after paying my consulting rate, he still saved a LOT of money by doing so, and therefore shortening the time for ROI drastically.

I’ve had a few problems though with Mandriva 2006. But it’s nothing serious, just glitches.
Some are quite strange tho. Like, how the start menu shows the image “KDE free 3.4”, but there’s no KDM in the display manager choices (there are only GDM and XDM ….)
Couldn’t create icons on the desktop – but this is probably a restriction on root account, since we can do that just fine on normal accounts.

Had problems with Compaq machines with ESS Audio drive chip (ES1869F), got around that by using sb module, thanks to this post.
But the strangest is 3Com’s 3C900B-TPO network cards, they just won’t boot to the LTSP server. When replaced by other NIC, the machine boots up normally into the server. We might have to replace these NICs.

The DHCP server doesn’t work properly, workstations are unable to get IP address from it. A friend then suggested that we used older version of dhcpd, to be exact, from Mandriva 2005. It then works without any more problem.

Mandriva 2006 seems to be quite a nice distro. Hopefully it’ll prove itself stable and reliable too for this server role.

God I am so tired. Gotta rest.

12 thoughts on “LTSP on Mandriva 2006

  1. Do you have recommend links for getting started with LTSP on Mandriva. I see there are not ltsp packages listed on rpms.mandrivaclub.com, so I wonder if there are special notes that apply to installing the rpms that lstp.org provides.

  2. Hi Mark, I didn’t use any packages from Mandriva, instead I installed LTSP from its own CD – [ LTSP ISO here ]

    It was pretty straight forward on the server side. I’ve put sample config files on this post (sorry it’s in Indonesian, just scroll down to find the sample files).

    On the workstations, as long as they’re all PCI (VGA, NIC, soundcard, etc), then it should be straightforward too.
    For NICs, check first that the etherboot images for it is available on http://rom-o-matic.net

    btw; nice website there, well done.

  3. Right, I just realized that if we entered “LTSP MANDRIVA” on Google, then this post showed up on #2.

    For those trying to find out potential problems with installing LTSP on Mandriva 2006 (before going ahead with the installation), well, it was pretty painless for me. No worries 🙂

    You might encounter problems when you start customizing it though.
    For example, if you want to be able to access USB / CD / floppy drive on workstation (keyword: localmedia), then you’d better upgrade your LTSP installation first. How ?

    1. ltspadmin
    2. Choose the second menu, make sure that it’s pointing to http://ltsp.org/ltsp-4.1/, then back to the main menu
    3. Choose the first menu. ltspadmin will try to figure out which packages needs to be updated / has an updated version available.
    4. Choose thos packages with updates available for it, then press Q. It will then start updating it.

    Then, follow the instruction to set up “local media” on wiki.ltsp.org, and you should be set.

    Enjoy.

  4. How did you roll back the dhcp server to 2005? I had the same problem as you with older machines (NICs) failing to launch X, even though they had worked perfectly with 2005. However, even when I compiled dhcpd from source it didn’t work. I couldn’t get back to the 2005 version because of failed dependencies. It seems to me the problem might not be with the dhcp server, but with some other part of 2006. What else did you have to do to get the 2005 dhcpd installed?

  5. hello everybody , i working ltsp on mandriva 2006 with new ltsp 4.2 and is work just fine without adding dhcp-server from mandriva 2006 but i;m confuse about local_dev in mandriva , since i’m working with suse 10 with ltsp 4.2 is great anything i plug in ltsp workstatiosn is read but when i used mandriva 2006 is working but not mounted … any suggested

  6. I just installed LTSP 4.2 on a Mandriva 2006 box, thanks to this blog I didn’t waste much too much time on the non-working DHCP package in Mandriva 2006 and quickly switched to the DHCP package from Mandriva 2005.

    Although as distro_ariex mentioned USB mounting on the LTSP clients in Mandriva 2006 is a mystery cause the clients seem to detect USB drives just fine but I dont see them being mounted anywhere…has anyone solved this?

  7. I’ve install Ltsp 4.2 in pclinuxos minime 93, and everything run smoothly…
    about usb mounting on mandriva 2006, maybe this will help….i did this in pclinuxos (base on mandrake 10.1)
    just change the ownership /dev/fuse so others can read and write, copy or make symlink /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/lbus.start.sh to /etc/X11/xinit.d/lbus.start.sh

    ok….selamat mencoba

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