[frgeek-michiana] Lab Notes, 2/14/06
- From: Tom Brown <tbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: FreeGeek Michiana <frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2006 10:52:41 -0500
:: Shelving
John, Goose and I added more shelves to the uprights already in the
warehouse offices. And, we dug out more uprights to construct more
shelving. John brought the pickup truck so we hauled the shelves by
the church lab door to the warehouse. Albert and his crews should
have quite a bit more storage.
We put the boxes on the floor on the new shelf space. The rooms are
roomier again.
:: FreeBox
Andrew and Albert loaded VL 4.3 on a box at the warehouse. When we
got there, Andrew was trying to get sound working. Mike helped him
while we worked on the shelves.
:: Automount, shmautomount
Automount continues to frustrate us. The problem is, only root can
write files to the floppy using automount. FreeBoxes are of limited
value to regular users if they can't automount floppies, read and
write floppies, and auto-unmount them.
Mike has been researching automount and Slackware. He has no trouble
finding the autofs (automount) config files on plain Slack. However,
VL 4.3 developers use some other method than Slackware uses to
automount floppies.
Mike found kernel headers for autofs in VL. There are man pages and
an autofs binary package installed. But there are no config files
which we can recognize as such.
We booted a FreeBox to the command line (no gui) and tested
automount. It works without a gui, which means VL is not using
rox-filer or a window or desktop manager to automount. We checked all
the processes running without a gui, and autofs (automount) is not
among them. The /var/log/messages file contains references to
submountd and subfs, which fail during boot up and don't appear as
running processes after boot. Mike is looking into those references.
:: Lab Server Build
Rick should be back next Tuesday. He will lead the lab server build.
The OS committee discussed how to test the build. Rick has eval
copies of Novell/Suse Enterprise Linux. Goose has a set of hardware
testing utilities and a Debian boot disk which he uses to burn in
boxes. Goose will contact Rick, and they will decide which method to
use to test the build.
:: Server OS Committee
The OS committee is going to test a novel idea, which could earn FGM
some cred if it works.
John proposed that we load VL or Slackware on the server so we can
easily teach FreeBox recipients to use their machines and avoid
learning to administer two different OSes, one for FreeBoxes and
another for the lab server. If Slack is too hard to administer, he
suggested we load the next favorite OS in the ranking. But try Slack first.
Mike suggested we load LTSP 4.x and any OS on a box, load VL 4.3 in
another partition, then attempt to boot a thin client to the VL
partition using LTSP. If this works, we can train new FreeBox users
on VL in the lab without much fuss, but install any OS as the base
for the server. This satisfied John.
Goose jumped at the chance to test the idea. We found a suitable box
for Goose to play with over the weekend. He will install Debian and
LTSP in one partition and VL 4.3 in another partition. He will
configure the server to boot to Debian and serve up Debian via LTSP.
Then he will change the LTSP config to boot thin clients from the VL
4.3 partition. If it works for one thin client, we'll test it at the
lab next Tuesday on several thin clients.
Although Mike was enthusiastic about the idea at first; by the end of
the lab session, he was doubtful it will work. We'll know next Tuesday.
###
To post to the list send email to <frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
You may unsubscribe or change your list settings by going to the list website at
<//www.freelists.org/webpage/frgeek-michiana>
Other related posts:
