User manual

Etherboot User Manual

If you want to run apps locally, well how long is a piece of string? Netscape will need say another

16MB. It all depends. Whatever you do, it’s worth trimming down on the services you run on the

client. Don’t run more virtual consoles than you need and don’t run unneeded daemons.

As for the server, in the X-terminal case this has all the applications running on it, so it should be

adequate for the multiuser aspect. A high-end Pentium, with 64 MB of memory to start with, and

between 8 and 16MB for each extra client is a good starting point. It will also depend on your mix of

client access, statistically perhaps not everybody will be running at the same time. Remember that

you don’t have to have one big server for all your clients, you can and you should distribute the load

across servers.

9.6. Other client applications

1. How can I print to a printer attached to a diskless client?

There is a server program called p910nd (http://www.etherboot.org/p910nd/) at the Etherboot web

site that funnels data from a TCP/IP connection to the printer port. You can instruct lpd or CUPS

(http://www.cups.org/) on the server to send jobs across the network to p910nd.

2. How can I output sound on the client?

There is a package called virtualfs (http://www.solucorp.qc.ca) that proxies the sound devices across

the network. It can also proxy the ﬂoppy drive.

Another solution is EsounD (http://www.tux.org/~ricdude/EsounD.html)

You may wish to check the LTSP (http://www.ltsp.org/) site and mailing lists for other proposed

solutions.

3. How can I access the ﬂoppy on the client?

Besides virtualfs mentioned above, recent distributions of mtools

(http://wauug.erols.com/pub/knaff/mtools/) have a ﬂoppyd. This only works with the mtools utilities

though.

9.7. Booting FreeBSD

1. Where are the instructions for booting FreeBSD?

For now, there is just a short document in the doc directory. Better versions of this document depend

on contributions from the FreeBSD community, I am unable to test FreeBSD because I don’t run it.