Re: [SLUG] Linux TS guru's

From: Ian C. Blenke (icblenke@nks.net)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2003 - 16:22:56 EDT


On Tuesday 29 April 2003 16:00, SpamFree wrote:
>
> Those familiar with X11 in the Unix world know that X11 though technically
> very different, offers very similar functionality in the sense that it can
> "export the display" to a remote client, which X11 confusingly calls the
> server. In any case a program is executed on a particular machine and the
> screen output from that program is displayed on a remote client, as is the
> case with Windows Terminal server.

The "client" makes a TCP socket connection to the "server". An X11 Display is
a server that accepts connections from clients and draws things on the
screen. You need an "X server" for your Windows box for the "X clients" to
connect to. The easiest way to pull up a full desktop session from the "Linux
Terminal Server" box is to use XDMCP (X display management control protocol)
to ask the remote box to start up clients to connect to your Windows based "X
server".

    You<-"X server" on local box<-"X11 protocol"<-"X client" on remote box

It's all a bit backwards to most Windows people.

> Now, to answer your question. I do not believe that it is possible to
> download the vmlinuz image from the LTSP server and "boot" it from within
> Windows. Once Windows boots PXE support is bypassed, it only runs right
> after the POST when the PC is first booted. I also do not see the point of
> trying this. If you wish to have Linux access from within Windows simple
> get an X11 client and use the exported display, as you said in your post.

You can "boot" a native Linux kernel under Windows using VMWare. You may make
a PXE boot floppy that is aware of the pcnet32 chipset, and you *could* run a
virtual machine that netboots from the server itself - but why go through
that pain?

There is a win32 port of User-Mode-Linux but it's really pre-alpha (without
even simple signal support). Unfortunately, this wouldn't buy you much, as
the virtual machine would have no access to any form of graphics hardware as
would be neccesary to run an X server.

> It is however possible, to have a Windows workstation with a PXE network
> card in it download and boot Linux from an LTSP server. You simply need to
> choose the PXE network boot option when you first power on the PC. This
> would give the effect of having a dual boot Windows/Linux machine even
> though only Windows would be stored on the local hard drive. Choosing a
> hard disk boot by bypassing the PXE boot process would thus boot Windows.

This can be really handy in a development/test environment. Our NKS build
environment is based off of network GRUB with boot menu options to auto-build
a dozen odd base machine images (various configurations, different kernels,
with RAID, purely for burnin) as well as Win2k (using a modular DOS boot
floppy to bootstrap from a Samba server).

-- 
- Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net>

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