[K12OSN] Re: Text-only sessions in K12

[Paul Amaranth]

This is more difficult than you would think.

You're running a graphical display manager that expects you're going to
log into an X session.

The SCREEN stuff is for local programs running on the client, so that
won't work as you've found out (except ... see below).

You could set up a telnet client on one of the SCREENs that would
give what you want.  One of those should be commented out in the lts.conf
file.  You should be able to set it up to telnet to your desired
server and present a login prompt.

Ssh would be more difficult since you've have to get the user keys into
the ltsp tree so it would be visible to the client.

You might be able to get a local xterm running to log into the server.
Run in full screen mode, that would give you pretty much what you want.
You can use the -geometry argument to set the size.  You'd set up a
script to run by one of the SCREEN commands for this.

Setting the users .xsession file to 
>    # $HOME/.xsession startup script
>    xterm &
>    ratpoison

as Kevin Squire suggested would work. The ratpoison window manager is
not part of the 4.2 ltsp distribution, but you could use icewm
In that case, you could change that to

    # $HOME/.xsession startup script
    icewm &
    xterm -geometry ...

Change the ... to get a full screen xterm.

If they ended xterm it would log out, or the logout on icewm would do it
as well.

Another way is to muck about with the PostLogin scripts run by gdm.
That's probably way too much trouble for what you want.

There's probably other ways, but that's all I can think of at the moment.

-- 
Paul Amaranth, GCIH  | Rochester MI, USA              
Aurora Group, Inc.   |   Security, Systems & Software 
paul at AuroraGrp.Com   |   Unix & Windows