[K12OSN] Booting older thin clients

[Petre Scheie]

You can boot a thin client from a CD, just like you can boot one from a 
floppy disk.  And you can still use the CD drive and the floppy drive 
for Local Device Access (LDA).  But there are some tradeoffs.  First, to 
use the CD or floppy drive, users will have to remove the boot 
CD/floppy, which means they're going to lose the CD/floppy or 
scratch/break it or forget to put it back in, etc.  If your users are 
all adults, this might, MIGHT be manageable; but if your users are kids, 
I think you'll find it frustrating.  BTW, LDA does not support music CDs 
in the clients.

You can buy a NIC with a bootrom for $20 at disklessworkstations.com. 
These are great, and you never have to worry about losing the boot 
media.  Of course, using an etherboot CD or floppy is cheaper, so it 
really depends on what your priority is.

Petre

rmcdaniel at indata.us wrote:
> I don't think that it would since after the system starts to boot,
> everything is run from the server.  I haven't tried using the CDs after
> the systems have booted.  Maybe someone else can expand on this.
> 
> 
> Ron
> 
> Ronald R. McDaniel
> Conecuh County Schools
> (251) 578-1752 x30
> (251) 363-3201 cell
> 1*4238*104 SouthernLinc
> rmcdaniel at indata.us
> 
> 
> 
>> -------- Original Message --------
>> Subject: Re: [K12OSN] Booting older thin clients
>> From: Michael Blinn <mblinn at peopleplaces.org>
>> Date: Tue, February 20, 2007 11:31 am
>> To: "Support list for open source software in schools."
>> <k12osn at redhat.com>
>>
>>       Does this method cause any issues with local devices? (for example, when a user wishes to access a local data CD?)
>>  Thanks Ron,
>>    Michael
>>  
>>  rmcdaniel at indata.us wrote:  In one of our labs that had older machines, I created a Bootable CD and
>>  use that in the machines to boot off of the K12LTSP server.
>>  
>>  Ron
>>  
>>  Ronald R. McDaniel
>>  Conecuh County Schools
>>  (251) 578-1752 x30
>>  (251) 363-3201 cell
>>  1*4238*104 SouthernLinc
>>  rmcdaniel at indata.us
>>  
>>  
>>  
>>   -------- Original Message --------
>>  Subject: [K12OSN] Booting older thin clients
>>  From: Michael Blinn <mblinn at peopleplaces.org>
>>  Date: Tue, February 20, 2007 11:04 am
>>  To: "Support list for open source software in schools."
>>  <k12osn at redhat.com>
>>  
>>  Hi - I would like to use a boatload of older pentium machines as k12ltsp 
>>  thin clients. Most are Pentium-MMX computers, though a few might be 
>>  PIIs. I don't think their BIOSs have a 'Boot from network' setting; nor, 
>>  at this point, do they have netboot-capable NICs in them. What steps 
>>  should I follow to set these up as clients? I'd like to batch-order NICs 
>>  and BIOSs (if necessary) so I'm dealing with all similar hardware. Any 
>>  suggestions? I'd love to not use floppies and just have them turn on and 
>>  go. I'm fairly new to this so please bear with me.. so far with this new 
>>  server I've only booted an AMD K2 w/ a 3c905tx using a floppy created 
>>  from rom-o-matic.
>>  
>>  Thanks,
>>  Michael Blinn
>>  
>>  -- 
>>  
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