Installing LTSP on Gentoo Linux
I'll continue adding LTSP setup info to this page as time goes by. I've put a LOT of effort into my scripts & setups over the past 2-3 years, and my local school has a bulletproof Terminal Server running up to 30 clients at a time.
pivot_root: No such file or directory
This one catches me out every time I install the Linux Terminal Server Project on Gentoo Linux - and possibly on other distros. Here's the problem: You install (or re-install) LTSP on your server, following the Gentoo/LTSP setup guide to the letter, and when you boot one of the terminals you get this message:
Doing the pivot_root
pivot_root: pivot_root: No such file or directory
Mounting the devfs filesystem
mount: Mounting /devfs on /dev failed: device or resource busy
Running /sbin/init
exec: /sbin/init: no such file or directory
(Followed by a kernel panic message & total lockup)
So, what's the cure? Simple: on your server, enter the /opt/ltsp-4.1/i386 folder (substitute ltsp-4.1 as required) Then, type mkdir oldroot ; mkdir proc ; mkdir dev and press enter. By default, Gentoo doesn't create these essential folders, and therefore the LTSP clients won't boot. Irritating? Took me ages to find and fix this last time around, and there's NOWHERE on the net detailing this solution.
Hope that helps someone. Note that the problem will re-occur if you emerge LTSP again, because it will delete the hand-created folders.
Another Gentoo LTSP Gotcha
I got an email from Bill Bill Arlofski from Reverse Polarity, who is setting up an LTSP server. He was glad to find the solution above, but was then hit by the following problem:
X fails to load on clients with an error message:
fatal server error: cannot open log file /var/log/Xorg.0.log
And he was also kind enough to supply the fix: Make sure that in /opt/ltsp-4.1/i386 there is a var symlink pointing to /tmp/var. Here's how:
cd /opt/ltsp-4.1/i386
ln -s /tmp/var var
(If you have any Gentoo LTSP fixes you'd like to share, feel free to contact me and I'll add them to this page. It's now ranked #1 in Google for several search terms related to Gentoo & LTSP, so your info will be delivered to exactly the right people.)
Setting up autologin with KDM, KDE and IceWM
Another gotcha. You want your terminals completely locked down so the kids can't mess with settings or unauthorised programs. IceWM is best for this. You don't want to mess about with login names and passwords - ideally, users walk up to a terminal, switch it on, and it goes straight into the LTSP desktop. Give them a shared folder for files, lock down the Mozilla Firefox settings and everything is sweet.
First step is to make sure every terminal has an entry in /etc/hosts. (Here's a chunk from mine which allows up to 40 terminals.) By using DHCP to allocate IP addresses from 192.168.1.10 and up, each terminal will have a host name. This is important when using autologin with kdm. You should also set up ws000 as the source for config settings for users ws001 to ws040. Nobody logs in as ws000, but you can use it to run & configure OpenOffice, for example, then copy the .openoffice config folder to all the other user directories. (I also have a complicated script for that, and a whole lot more.)
In your kdmrc file, make sure Xdmcp is enabled and paste one of these blocks to the end of the file for each user from ws001 to ws040 (I use a script to do this):
[X-ws001:0-Core]
AutoLoginEnable=true
AutoLoginUser=ws001
[X-ws001:0-Greeter]
DefaultUser=ws001
PreselectUser=Default
(etc)
You should also set AutoReLogin=true in the [X-*-Core] section. Some time back the default was changed to 'disabled' in Gentoo, which drove me insane for about a week until I realised what they'd done.
Make sure you echo "Session=IceWM" > /home/wsNNN/.dmrc for each user (ws001 to ws040) This will force IceWM to boot as the default.
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