Installing LTSP on Slackware

Slackware 10.0

Main show stopper on Slackware is missing perl modules when installing LTSP 4.1. Because Slackware uses BSD instead of SysV style init soem config file must be edited by hand. Dhcpd will need to be added to rc.local to start dhcpd.

Solving the ltspadmin x Perl trouble on Slackware 10.0

The missing Perl modules on Slackware 10 are really annoying, specially because after downloading the libwww-perl that ltspadmin asks for, the library itself requires 3 more Perl packages, one of which depends on yet another package. To make the story short, here are the links for all of them:

Module	Package	Notes
libwww-perl	http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/G/GA/GAAS/libwww-perl-5.803.tar.gz	depends on HTML-Parser, Compress::Zlib and URI
HTML-Parser	http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/G/GA/GAAS/HTML-Parser-3.44.tar.gz	depends on HTML::Tagset
Compress::Zlib	http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/P/PM/PMQS/Compress-Zlib-1.33.tar.gz	no dependencies
URI	http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/G/GA/GAAS/URI-1.35.tar.gz	no dependencies
HTML::Tagset	http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/S/SB/SBURKE/HTML-Tagset-3.04.tar.gz	no dependencies

Unpack them somewhere and then go for the usual build and install:

  perl Makefile.PL
  make
  make install

Now you should have ltspadmin working just fine on Slack 10!

-- ClaudioFelix - 30 Dec 2004

Getting rid of the "gray screen with a black x"

Both Slackware 9.1 and 10 do not come with XDMCP enabled by default and ltspcfg currently doesnŽt know how to enable it on Slackware. As many have noticed, that results on a big gray screen with a black cross in the middle after the workstations boot. I personally use the KDM login manager and the way to enable XDMCP on it is quite easy:

First, you have to make the server listen for XDMCP requests. For that, locate the file /opt/kde/share/config/kdm/kdmrc and make sure the [Xdmcp] section has "Enable=true":

[Xdmcp]
Enable=true
Willing=/opt/kde/share/config/kdm/Xwilling
Xaccess=/opt/kde/share/config/kdm/Xaccess

Now, you have to allow the other hosts on your LAN to send XDMCP requests to the server. That is done by uncommenting the line beggining with an askterisk on the file /opt/kde/share/config/kdm/Xaccess:

     *              #any host can get a login window

If IŽm not mistaken there is a way to restrict this so it's not "any" host, but just those on your local network. When I remember it I'll post it here, but anyway, if your LTSP server is connected to the Internet, you should already have restricted it on your firewall, right?

-- ClaudioFelix - 13 Jan 2005

Note about ipv6 and XDM

In addition, at least one user has reported that he needed to load the ipv6 kernel module before XDM would work properly for him.

Or add LISTEN 0.0.0.0 to /etc/X11/xdm/Xaccess to force xdm to ignore it's IPv6 code.

-- BrianBuchanan - 2005-07-10

Enabling remote system logging on Slackware

Another thing that is missing after the installation of LTSP on Slackware is the remote logging of the workstations. You can notice that when the workstations boot they say "syslogd: cannot write to remote file handle on 192.168.1.2:514", where 192.168.1.2 should be the IP address of your LTSP server. To fix that, locate the file /etc/rc.d/rc.syslog and append the -r switch to the syslog daemon:

syslogd_start() {
  if [ -x /usr/sbin/syslogd -a -x /usr/sbin/klogd ]; then
    echo -n "Starting sysklogd daemons:  "
    echo -n "/usr/sbin/syslogd "
    /usr/sbin/syslogd -r                         #<== *** -r GOES HERE!!***
    sleep 1 # prevent syslogd/klogd race condition on SMP kernels
    echo "/usr/sbin/klogd -c 3 -x"
    # '-c 3' = display level 'error' or higher messages on console
    # '-x' = turn off broken EIP translation
    /usr/sbin/klogd -c 3 -x
  fi
}

-- ClaudioFelix - 13 Jan 2005