[K12OSN] Mac Client Limitations (long email)

[Shawn Powers]

Ok, there's some serious macintosh activity going on now (woo hoo!) so I 
have to put out a few gotchas to see if anyone has feedback...

- I haven't figured out a way to shut off the "chubby" clients once 
booted and connected to the LTSP server.  I want to look at the inittab 
file, and see if you can map a keystroke to the "halt" command -- 
because right now I have to power off the computer by the switch.  Since 
it's running an installed linux underneath, that risks disk damage.

- Flash won't work for me.  It crashes (silently) mozilla when I go to a 
flash site.  I KNOW there  is not a PPC Linux version of flash, but a 
remote X Session is running on the i386 machine, so it should work. 
Huck, Chuck, -- does flash work for you?  Is it perhaps my X 
configuration on the mac?

- mouse emulation sucks.  Yes, it works great (see my last couple 
emails) but it's really frustrating to use keyboard buttons.  The good 
news for Huck is that if he's using fruity G3s, he can get cheap usb 
"real" mice, and they work really well.

- installing is still cumbersome.  I have a few ideas for automating the 
process, but time... time... time...  Does anyone know if linux can run 
from an HFS or HFS+ partition?  I'm not on the DebianPPC list anymore, 
but perhaps I'll have to join again.  Also, if I can get quik to work 
consistantly, we could avoid the need for MacOS at all -- which would 
allow for disk images to be distributed (a REAL plus for those that 
don't want to take the time to set up images for machines)

- with the all-in-one computers (like my 5500s) does anyone know how to 
tweak the monitor?  My displays are a bit off-center, and need to be 
stretched.  I was thinking that maybe fbset would tweak stuff like that, 
but I haven't tried yet.  Input would be appreciated.

- lastly -- is the ltsp-ppc stuff Eric mentioned regarding using the 
Apple_Netboot technology to boot linux instead of MacOS?  That would be 
great -- and since I have 2 labs booting MacOS from a linux server, I 
would love to try getting linux images to boot.  That's one of the 
reasons I wonder if linux will boot from HFS, or exactly how to get 
Netboot to boot something other than MacOS.  It would be nice if you 
just had to replace the MacOSROM file on the tftp server with a linux 
kernel.. but I'm sure it's not that simple. :)

Sorry for blabbing on and on, but this is the stuff that is fun for me. 
  It beats fixing printer jams... ;o)
-- 
Shawn Powers
Technology Director
Inland Lakes Schools
PHN: 231-238-6868 x9174
FAX: 509-356-7024
spowers at inlandlakes.org
http://techcorner.inlandlakes.org