OK, I think I better understand you. You want to export an entire Slackware filesystem via NFS (or NBD) to your laptop as its root filesystem, right? But you don't have any means of mounting boot media on your laptop, so you want to do a PXE boot and install to the NFS mounted disc on your server, top. Right? If so, that's beyond my expertise. I'm not even sure it would be feasible without a whole lot of RAM on your laptop. But there are a couple of HOWTOs in Slackware under /usr/doc/Linux-HOWTOs/ about NFS-mounting your root partition on a diskless client. Maybe you could get some ideas there.

Since I maintain a couple of LTSP installations, I have a couple of vmware images running duplicates of these installations on my home workstation for testing purposes. One image is Edubuntu 7.10 running LTSP5, and the other is Slackware 11 running LTSP4.2. My workstation is a dual Xeon 1.7 GHz, 1.5 GB RAM, IBM Intellistation, so not a super-duper machine. I can say from experience that it works fine (a bit slow with multimedia) for just connecting with one or two clients, even when both images are up and running. This seems to be the simplest method of achieving the equivalent of a Slackware installation for your laptop, to me. Then all your laptop has to have is 64MB of RAM to run the display, and the vmware LTSP server will not interfere with your server, top, except for the resources it takes to run the vmware server.

Thats exactly what im trying to achieve yes!:) Thanks for the tip ill look into it tomorrow!

If anyone else has tip how to achieve this please post a msg here.



Exactly agreed with you. Ill play with that later, since i never played with vmware since i had/have conclusion that it will eat alot of ram etc while running :) What would you recommend as a configuration of Top for lets say to have 3 virtual machines in vmware(ltsp is not included, just as
an example). Also what about Virtualbox in comparision with vmware what would you recommend to use just to install normal virtual machines.

Although one quick question what i get when building lbe, i didnt quite understand? Does that mean that then i can include more apps in ltsp in comparision when it comes to original installation? or its something more complex?

I want to say big thanks, to you and guys before who posted and helped me in digging this stuff out!

Also if someone has ideas about nfs mounting regarding my scenario please post :)

Thanks!

I've got 4 vmware images on my workstation that I use for testing : the Edubuntu and Slackware images that I mentioned before, a Win2K Pro image, and a Debian image for testing the Evergreen library ILS software. I've got 628 MB RAM allocated for the Edubuntu and Slackware virtual machines, 512 MB RAM for the Evergreen machine, and 256 MB for Win2K. I can have any two virtual machines running at the same time, but I haven't tried to have three running concurrently yet. Both VmWare and VirtualBox seem to command all the RAM allocated for any image when that image is up and running, and VmWare itself needs about 45 MB of memory to manage the virtual images. So as long as you don't need to do big compiles or other resource heavy computing on your server while running the virtual machines, you can allocate all except for about 512 MB of your server's RAM for virtual machines and still work comfortably on the server.

LTSP recommends to have minimum 256 MB RAM for the server to run the services necessary for LTSP, plus 128 MB on the server for each concurrent client that will connect to the server. More RAM is always better.

The Edubuntu vmware install is chock full of software, so it takes up 6.7 GB of harddrive space with LTSP. The Slackware image is about 3.5 GB with LTSP, and the other two images are around 2 GB apiece. I don't keep any user data on the virtual images, other than configuration files, since these are just for testing purposes. I can access any of my user data on my native Slackware install through ssh, samba, or nfs from the virtual machines if I need to.

I've got VirtualBox installed on my laptop. It runs just about as well as VMWare, and is open source. I think I prefer the VmWare management console over VirtualBox though. And VirtualBox was a bit more complicated to set up, since I had to setup the bridged network on the laptop manually. Other than that, I don't think there is a lot to differentiate between them.

Yes, you can build your own customized ltsp chroot with LBE. Or you can install the standard LTSP distribution, chroot into the /opt/ltsp directory, and start installing apps from within the chroot. I've done this for a few apps like firefox, openoffice, and x11vnc, so they can run locally on the thin client. The standard LTSP install is a Debian-based beast though, so you would have to start from scratch with LBE if you wanted a Slackware-flavoured ltsp install.

This can get as complicated as you want it, and very quickly too. :) Even just keeping track of what machine is running on the display at the moment can be challenging.

Thanks bro! from virtual machine prospective and ltsp you answered
everything i that i asked about. Now still theres nfs-root that i will read about shortly. Ill see if i get about some idea how to achieve this.

Laptop is 1.2Mhz with 32mb graphics card and 512mb ram. Im wondering if that will be enough ram for nfs root mounting? :)

Hopefully some other ppls would post some their ideas how to achieve what i want :)

Thanks!