[K12OSN] Fedora-9 LTSP - Need help with various issues - probably FAQ
John Ellson
john.ellson at comcast.net
Sat Jan 17 16:08:46 UTC 2009
Warren, and others.
Thanks for your guidance.
Some feedback.
First, since there was a suggestion that fc10 might fix some issues and
we were expecting to upgrade soon anyway, we decided to go ahead and do
it. I have to say that it was not a very satisfactory experience.
-Udev or something in fc10 decided to ignore the modprobe aliases
and ifcfg-eth* numbering of the interfaces, in particular bridge ports
no longer take numbers apparently. So our upstream interface which was
eth1 became eth0 and picked up the wrong static configuration, resulting
in the server not reappearing on the network.
- Yum or rpm, or anaconda, failed to upgrade a number of rpms which
were the same version number, but just fc10 instead of fc9. Its as if
some version comparison routine isn't seeing 10 > 9 ? This definitely
broke cups until I manually upgraded the rpms using --oldpackage. It
may have broken other things too as I'm still looking for fc9 rpms that
are not in fc10 (difficult because the fc10 distro does contain some fc9
rpms).
- The kernel, or xorg, failed to properly configure the resolution
of some client monitors that had worked fine in fc9. It would show the
login screen at twice the proper size so that we could only see half of
it. We discovered that it was related to the use of VGA cables on
radeon3200 graphics cards. Switching to DVI cables where possible
seems to fix it, but now we have to replace a couple of VGA-only
monitors to get back to where we were with fc9.
We have a new problem with nautilus and bonobo on the (slower?) i386
clients. The nautilus desktop icons appear to flash up briefly before
the desktop appears, then the desktop shows no icons and an error popup:
"Nautilus cannot be used now due to an unexpected error from bonobo
when attempting top locate the factory. Killing
bonobo-acticvation-server and restarting nautilus may help fix the problem."
Killing bonobo-activation-server doesn't seem to have any effect, but
starting nautilus from a shell woks, except that we really can't expect
the elementary kids to do that.
Fedora 10 has made client sound worse. We used to hear very quiet
sounds, now nothing. In /var/log/messages I see stuff like:
Jan 15 18:26:23 sol pulseaudio[2806]: polkit.c: Cannot set UID on
session object
.
Jan 15 18:26:23 sol pulseaudio[2806]: main.c: Called SUID root and
real-time/high-priority scheduling was requested in the configuration.
However, we lack the necessary priviliges:
Jan 15 18:26:23 sol pulseaudio[2806]: main.c: We are not in group
'pulse-rt' and
PolicyKit refuse to grant us priviliges. Dropping SUID again.
Jan 15 18:26:23 sol pulseaudio[2806]: main.c: For enabling real-time
scheduling please acquire the appropriate PolicyKit priviliges, or
become a member of 'pulse-rt', or increase the RLIMIT_NICE/RLIMIT_RTPRIO
resource limits for this user.
Jan 15 18:26:23 sol pulseaudio[2806]: pid.c: Stale PID file,
overwriting.
Jan 15 18:26:23 sol pulseaudio[2806]: main.c: setrlimit(RLIMIT_NICE,
(31, 31)) failed: Operation not permitted
Jan 15 18:26:23 sol pulseaudio[2806]: main.c:
setrlimit(RLIMIT_RTPRIO, (9, 9)) failed: Operation not permitted
USB memory sticks are no better. When we plug one in nautilus shows
the mount, and the folder can be opened seeing file and directory icons,
but the files can't be read. For example, clicking on an image produced
an error from eog: "error reading from file, cannot allocate memory"
I saw your note indicating that this was handled by "gvfs", OK, so where
do I look for gvfs problems?
Is it possible that both USB and sound problems are authentication
related? Does the upgrade process even attempt to migrate for new
authentication requirements? Is there a guide specifically on
authentication set up, or better yet, an audit script to suggest what
might need changing?
Thanks for the pointers to latest howto
<http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/LtspDocumentationUpstream>
and the technique for upgrading kernels in the chroot images. Can I
suggest that a paragraph on chroot updates, and a link to the larger
howto be added to https://fedorahosted.org/k12linux/wiki/InstallGuide
? I really like that page as a one-stop quickstart for ltsp on Fedora.
I haven't had a chance to retry local apps.
John
Warren Togami wrote:
> John Ellson wrote:
>> - Sound "works," if the classroom is silent and you have very good
>> ears! How do I increase the volume on all clients to a useful
>> level?
>> In /var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/*/lts.conf we have:
>> SOUND=True
>> VOLUME=100
>> HEADPHONE_VOLUME=100
>> PCM_VOLUME=100
>> FRONT_VOLUME=100
>> There was recent discussion, for Ubuntu, at:
>> http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Ubuntu/2008-08/msg01267.html
>> should I be trying to apply this?
>
> I have noticed this as well. I am digging into this sometime soon
> myself.
>
>>
>> - If I plugin a USB memory stick in the client, I get an icon on the
>> desktop, which I can open with nautilus, but none of the content is
>> shown? Where do I look next?
>
> I have never seen this personally, although I haven't used F9 for a
> few months now. Could you please try booting your server with the
> K12Linux F10 Live Server and see if the clients behave the same there?
>
>>
>>
>> - Where is the FAQ on how to update the client images properly?
>> I tried using yum in the chroot, but kernel updates didn't work, so
>> now I'm rebuilding the client images from scratch periodically.
>
> After updating the kernels in the chroot, did you use
> "ltsp-update-kernels" outside the chroot to copy the kernel from
> inside the chroot to /var/lib/tftpboot/ARCH/?
>
>>
>>
>> - Where is the step-by-step FAQ on configuring and installing local
>> apps?
>
> Umm... upstream should have this documented, if not please yell at
> them. The only thing unique about our local apps installation is yum
> instead of apt.
>
>>
>>
>> - Are last-modified-in-2004 FAQs like the one at:
>> http://ltsp.mirrors.tds.net/pub/ltsp/docs/ltsp-4.1-en.html still
>> accurate? I assume that the current documentation is supposed to be
>> at https://fedorahosted.org/k12linux/, but there seems to be a lot
>> missing there.
>
> Could you please make a list of specific documentation items you
> really need rewritten for K12Linux? The old docs are so old that it
> would be better to write them from scratch.
>
> Warren Togami
> wtogami at redhat.com
>
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--
John Ellson
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