Tips and Tricks/Devices

This page discusses all kinds of devices in relation to LTSP, for instance, printers, scanners and local media.

Local Devices
Local devices such as USB sticks, CD-ROM drives, or even floppy disks need special configuration in order to be accessed from the thin client. The following value allows to enable the use of various local devices:

You can also set options to disable access to certain accessible devices.

You can also deny access to devices by specifying a comma-separated list of sysfs attributes. To get these attributes use the udevadm command on the client.

Keyboard
All of the keyboard support files are copied into the chroot, so configuring international keyboard support is simply a matter of configuring X.org. There are several configuration parameters for this. The values for these parameters are from the X.org documentation. Whatever is valid for X.org is valid for these parameters.

We would like to add documentation to show what values are needed for each type of international keyboard. If you work with this and can configure your international keyboards, feedback to LTSP would be greatly appreciated.

Printer
Sometimes, it’s convenient to hang a printer off of a thin client in a lab, so that the computer lab has access to local printing resources. Fortunately, LTSP can accommodate printing on the workstation.

LTSP can connect up to 3 printers per workstation to the network via a small daemon called JetPipe. Both parallel and USB printers are supported. JetPipe makes the printer look like a standard HP Jet Direct printer interface. You can then create any CUPS printer on your server, and point it at the printer via a Jet Direct connection.

In your DNS configuration, you’ll want to assign a static IP for the terminal with the printers, to guarantee that it gets the same IP address every time it boots. Otherwise, your printing won’t work if the terminal leases a different IP address.

Some common options for the printer client are the following. Other options (for serial printers) are available in the lts.conf manpage. To add another printer, raise the integer in the configuration option.

You can set the printers that clients are allowed to print to with the following options. For printers to be accessible on each client, the CUPS server must be configured to share printers. Refer to the CUPS manual for your distribution for detailed setup instructions.

Scanner
A scanner can be enabled in the thin client with the following configuration.

Sound
If you have a special sound device on a thin client and have to manually go and disable the built in audio every time through pavucontrol then this command in the users autostart may help

pactl set-card-profile 0 off