Installing LTSP-5 from tarball image

Ok, so you'd like to install LTSP-5, but it hasn't been integrated into your favorite distribution of Linux yet?

Well, we've got the solution for you. You can download one of the pre-built LTSP-5 tarballs, and drop it on to any Linux system you want. BUT! This is still an advanced thing to do. Recommended only for people who have already used older versions of LTSP, and understand the administration of TFTP, DHCP, NFS and other things required by a terminal server.

The basic steps are:

1. Make sure you have all the prerequisite services for an LTSP server, such as a TFTP, DHCP and NFS servers. In addition, you'll also need an SSH server.
2. Download the LTSP-5 tarball of your choice
3. Download the ltsp-update-kernels package
4. Download the ltsp-update-sshkeys package
5. Unpack the LTSP-5 tarball into the /opt directory
6. Unpack the ltsp-update-kernels and ltsp-update-sshkeys packages and drop the 2 scripts into the /usr/local/sbin directory.
7. Run ltsp-update-kernels. This will copy the kernels from the ltsp tree to a place where your TFTP server can get them.
8. Run ltsp-update-sshkeys. This simply sets up the ssh_known_hosts file to know about the server.
9. Configure your NFS server by making sure your /etc/exports file contains an entry for /opt/ltsp
10. Configure your DHCP server to have the right filename and root-path entries to point to the right kernel and ltsp tree.

If everything goes right, and you turn on your thin client and it boots all the way up to the login prompt, the first thing you'll probably notice is that it's NOT using an XDMCP Display manager, such as GDM, KDM or XDM. Instead, it uses the LTSP Display Manager (LDM) by default. LDM is a gui login screen that captures your userid and password, and hands it SSH to spawn a session on the server. The great thing about this is that all of the X traffic is tunneled through SSH, which encrypts it, giving you a better level of security than that offered by XDMCP. If, on the other hand, you'd like to go ahead and use XDMCP anyway, you can do this by adding SCREEN_07 = startx to your lts.conf file. Don't worry if you don't already have a lts.conf file. LTSP no longer requires that file for a default configuration.

The instructions above should give you a pretty basic idea of what needs to be done. Certainly a more details set of installation instructions could be written, but at least you now have an idea of how to get started with the tarballs. For a truly simple installation of LTSP, please contact the maintainers of your favorite distro, and let them know that you'd like to have LTSP-5 properly integrated into their system.

-- JimMcQuillan - 10 Mar 2007

If using etherboot (netboot?), "the right kernel" will be nbi.img

-- UuuuUuuu^? - 16 Mar 2007