Re: [seul-edu] K-12 LTSP

[Rasjid Wilcox <rasjidw@openminddev.net>]

On Sun, 1 Dec 2002 12:15 pm, jeff williams wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> Is this a common occurance?  One of my students was tasked with installing
> an Linux Terminal Server in one of our classrooms.  It seems the classroom
> computers are simply unable to run Windows 2000, but will make nice X
> terminals.
>
> Anyway, said student grabbed K-12 LTSP as the basis for the installation. 
> The documentation seemed unclear, and the kernels included would not boot. 
> The target systems are HP Vectra 3s with upgrade 200 Pentium processors. 
> Now I realize these are not the friendliest systems to work upon, but this
> perserverant lad spent well over 30 hours trying to get this to work.
>
> Yesterday we downloaded the standard LTSP binaries and had a working system
> in less than an hour.
>
> Thus the question, is K-12 LTSP broken, or is it our hardware that is so
> flakey as to be unusable for their pre-compiled kernels?

Hard to say what the problem was without more info.  Did the HP Vectra's boot 
the K-12 LTSP install CD okay?  Was it just the network boot that failed?  
What error messages were given by the kernel, or did it just fail to start up 
at all?  Are the kernel versions between K-12 LTSP and standard LTSP 
different?  Do they have different pre-compiled modules? ...

Any more diagnosis would require more information.

I recently had the situation that I could not get a (recent) 2.2 kernel to 
boot on a brand new system.  The install CD booted fine, but upon rebooting 
from the hard-drive, the kernel complained about lost interrupts, and 
harddisk access was possible but essentially unusable.  Almost an hour 
searching on google led to the idea to boot up the 'uni-processor' (non-smp) 
kernel, and it worked fine.

Cheers,

Rasjid.

-- 
Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia (UTC +10 hrs)
http://www.openminddev.net