[K12OSN] K12LTSP missing some important stuff for our school purposes

[Petre Scheie]

Hey Tim,
1. Can you (or anyone else) elaborate on how you get PXE to download and run Etherboot? 
  I've got some machines that have PXE, but, as you say, they won't boot.

2. How do you use the 3c905c as an eprom programmer?  I assume you load a full linux on 
the host system and run some sort of utility?

Thanks.

Petre

Timothy Legge wrote:
> Hi Tom
> 
>> 2. Sound -- I have about 25 workstations I'd like to use with 
>> K12LTSP... but
>> they are all pretty diverse platforms: many different NICs, sound 
>> cards, and
>> video cards. Is there any easy way to do this...? Or is it a matter of
>> researching each individual hardware setup to get things rolling? I'm
>> thinking of sinking for a couple dozen $20 network cards so that at 
>> least I
>> have that in common. Besides, booting workstations with floppies seems 
>> to me
>> to be too much of a hassle.
> 
> Since you are in Alberta, take a look at http://vfxweb.com for Network 
> cards.  They have used 3com cards for as little as 4.00 and often have 
> PXE bootable cards for fairly cheap.
> 
> They also sell a number of sound cards for pretty cheap.
> 
> I have some experience with network cards, floppies, boot roms etc.  I 
> would say it is a reliability/cost tradeoff.  Boot floppies are cheapest 
> but not always reliable.  Even if the floppy works, it may be misplaced.
> 
> These days I go with PXE, Etherboot Roms, Floppy in that order.  PXE 
> does not alway work reliably and I have several PCs that use PXE to 
> download Etheboot because the PXE rom will not boot a kernel but will 
> boot Etherboot.
> 
> I have a rom programmer but the 3com 3c905C is usable as a cheap eprom 
> programmer.  You can often reclaim good rom chips from hardware that you 
> are tossing...
> 
>> 4. K12LTSP on Pentium I & II / 10 Mbps networks -- slow and unusable! 
>> I see
>> lots of people talking about using old hardware with K12LTSP but I'm only
>> getting acceptable performance from PIII/500+ MHz 100 Mbps NIC, and this
>> seems to me to be a minimum hardware requirement. Even then, something 
>> like
>> Celestia crawls compared to the way it does with a local hard drive
>> installation. Any tips? Am I missing something?
> 
> 10 Mbps is pretty much useless especially as a lot of 10 Mbps "switches" 
> are just hubs which means everyone is sharing the 10 Mbps.  I have used 
> as little as a 486 but you don't really want to.
> 
> We don't currently accept donations of hardware less than a PII but 
> mostly is is just an attempt to slowly move forward.
> 
> If you can avoid it, you don't want to deal with ISA and old video cards 
> and monitors.  You want any piece of hardware you have to be useable 
> without configuration when you plug it in.  Old monitors/videocards do 
> not always sync automatically so I just avoid the really old (circa 
> 1995) stuff now.
> 
>> Despite the hurdles I'm pretty interested and optimistic. It seems 
>> like an
>> amazing project, though certainly NOT "easy and working, duh?" yet.
> 
> Linux thin clients are by far one of the best ways to really increase 
> reliability and decrease support requirements.  It takes a little work 
> to tweak it but essentially runs itself after that...
> 
> Tim
> 
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