[K12OSN] imacs as thin clients?

[Jim Kronebusch]

On Thu, 01 Mar 2007 09:53:38 -0800, Jeff Davis wrote
> Has anyone managed to get older PPC imacs to work as thin clients? 
>  Can someone point me to a howto?

Which iMacs specifically?  The Bondi Blue 233Mhz iMacs work great out of the
box.  The other versions might need a tweaked XF86config.  You need to either
have a new enough version that can network boot via holding the "N" key down,
or modify the firmware to boot.  I just googled for instructions and found an
old email from myself:

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Yes, you can use an iMac as a diskless workstation.  If you have changed your
server IP from the default of 192.168.1.254 then you need to
modify /opt/ltsp/ppc/etc/lts.conf and modify the line at the top of
the file that points to your server to match the actual IP.  I believe
that if you are using K12LTSP version 5 this updates automatically.  After
that you can simply boot your iMac by holding down the "N" key on the
keyboard.  If that for some reason does not work, try booting with
cmd+option+o+f which will bring you to a command prompt.  Then at the prompt
type "boot enet:192.168.1.254;yaboot" with out the quotes and the IP set to
match your server IP.  If either of the changes above work let us know, if you
have one of the lucky ones that require the firmware command then there is a
set of instructions to set it permanent.

Boot with apple+option+o+f again
Type the follwing at the command line:

setenv boot-device enet:192.168.0.254

Hit enter.

setenv auto-boot? true

Hit enter.

reset-all

Hit enter.

The machine should reboot and now automatically boot to ltsp every time
it is powered up.

Tip:  If for some reason your machine will not boot after entering boot
enet:192.168.0.254 with some error that 
it cannot find a boot loader or whatever, try this:

boot enet:192.168.0.254,yaboot

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