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.