Re: [K12OSN] old systems as ltsp clients, boot/video woes

[Chris Thomas <cwt137 yahoo com>]

--- "Scott D. Sanders" <ssanders coin org> wrote:

> you could rig up a nifty old-fashioned DOS boot menu
> on the HD to give it
> a choice of LTSP or the normal W98 boot:
> 
> http://www.mindspring.com/~dmerriman/Bootup.htm
> 
I tried this but windows loads some stuff that gets in
the way of etherboot. The system has to be almost
completely "clean" for etherboot to work. Pressing F8
and staring "Safe Mode Command Prompt" will load
command.com and nothing else (i think). With this, I
was able to use the dos executable etherboot image. I
got tired of this and followed the "LILO with
Etherboot" directions on the etherboot website.
http://www.etherboot.org/doc/html/lilo+etherboot/t1.html
All I had to do is change the config file to point to
my etherboot image, download the lilo version of the
etherboot image and follow the rest of the
instructions. Now that lilo is working on my win9x
systems, I don't have to worry anymore about pressing
F8 to use etherboot.



--- eworthy shaw ca wrote:
> Second and probably more important all these
> machines have ATI-Mach64
> video cards in them.  They work fine at 16bit colour
> depth in 'Windows'
> but LTSP refuses to work at 15 or 16bit color in any
> resolution on these
> cards.  If I modify the color depth to 8 bit they
> work but look so bad,
> I could not in good conscience ask anyone to use
> them.  Does anyone know
> why these cards work adequately in windows but not
> in X/ltsp?

I've heard of similar problems. In my case the xfree
4.x driver didn't work for my terminals so I used the
3.3.6 version. Instead of making an entry for every
computer with the offending card, I decided to change
the entry in the file which autodetects the videocard.
This is how I did it:
First I started a terminal in runlevel 3. When I got
to the prompt, I ran "cat /proc/bus/pci/devices" The
second column is the pci id of the cards in the
system. I then searched for that pci id in the
/opt/ltsp/i386/etc/vidlist file. Next I changed the
entry from s3 (the 4.x driver) to XF86_S3 (the 3.3.6
driver). Then I put back the runlevel of the terminals
to 5 again. Then I restarted the terminals. This fixed
my problem. You can change your entry form ati to
XF86_MACH64 and see if it helps.

Chris

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