[K12OSN] Client Display/Boot Problem

[David Beach]

I am new to Linux and K12LTSP. The concept of 'thin clients' looked
intriguing for use by our family around the house. (I'm tired of maintaining
multiple machines.... I can sympathize with school computer administrators!)
So, I got a copy of the K12LTSP disks (4.0.0), loaded then into a computer
(1.2 GHz Athlon) and connected another old PC with a NIC/boot ROM and a
crossover cable. (It didn't go quite as smoothly as that...)

When I boot the client via PXE, all seems to go OK with screens of
incomprehensible (to me) info rolling by. So, the client is talking OK with
the server. However, as it nears the end of booting, some message comes up
about difficulty the video card then the screen goes blank. And stays that
way until I reboot. (The video card works fine under Windows.)

The client is a 200MHz Pentium with an ATI Mach64 card. The card is a bit
old but I think pretty common and 'generic.'

I don't even know where to look to see where video drivers are, how to
determine if that's the problem, etc. I find the documentation either seems
to be, if I make an analogy to swimming, like dipping your toe in the water
or jumping off the deep end, with not much in between. I was looking to sort
of 'wade around' about knee deep for a while! And some of the stuff refers
to Red Hat 7 or 8 and I'm never sure is I can't make sense of something
because I am missing the point or if that feature has changed in the move to
Fedora.

I don't mind reading, digging around and trying to edit files, etc.
(although my Linux experience is near zero) but I sure would appreciate a
few directions about where I might start.

David Beach
Picton, Ontario