2008/01/11/#edubuntu.txt

[00:41] <nentis> anyone get an ebox-2300sx to work with ltsp?
[00:42] <nentis> this device is killing me.  no math co-processor.. no amount of kernels seems to work.
[00:44] <lns> wow...back to the 386-sx days! no math coprocessor....WHY GOD, WHY?!
[00:44] <nentis> :(
[00:44] <lns> and i always wondered what the SX-2 series was supposed to be....twice the non-existent math co processor??
[00:45] <nentis> double the clock speed?
[00:46] <nentis> I'm not happy that I may have 50 paper weights and 0 thin-clients.
[00:46] <lns> you should have gotten 1 and tested it.... ?
[00:46] <nentis> the 2300 (non SX) tested fine.
[00:46] <nentis> but yes
[00:47] <lns> never used an ebox myself
=== gnomefre2k is now known as gnomefreak
[04:26] <Meshezabeel> how can I get gcompriz to go full screen so that gnome panels are not in the way?
[04:26] <Meshezabeel> gcompris
[04:38] <johnny> add the lil sliders to the panel so you can hide them
[04:39] <johnny> that's about the best you can do until the app itself does it
[04:43] <Meshezabeel> ok, thanks, was hoping for a bit easier way for my kindergarten students, but guess I'll just have to put up with it for now ;)
[04:43] <johnny> well submit a feature request to run it full screen
[04:43] <johnny> but if that's the only app you're using.. you could make the session run it full screen
[04:43] <johnny> and not have gnome loaded at all
[04:43] <Meshezabeel> well, it does have a full screen option, it just doesn't seem to work for me
[04:44] <johnny> sounds like a bug
[04:44] <johnny> you're gonna have to talk to them
[04:44] <johnny> i guess
[04:44] <Meshezabeel> ok, thanks
[07:30] <Burgundavia> johnny: gcompris can full screen
[07:32] <johnny> yeah.. he just said it didn't work
[08:14] <Harrison___> Hi I wonder if someone can help me. I'm 12 years old and have installed edubuntu on a laptop. If I can get it working, then I can use the laptop. However I'm stuck. if I enable the restricted driver, I get composite extension not available. if I disable it, I get desktop effects could be enabled...can someone please offer some help? as the forums seem to ask you to do one or the other
[08:14] <Harrison___> and as i've done both, I seem to be stuck between 2 errors
[08:14] <Harrison___> it's edubuntu 7.10
[08:15] <Harrison___> or is there a better channel to ask the question in?
[08:19] <nentis> your hardware might not support the special graphics
[08:19] <nentis> if an intel video card
[08:19] <nentis> you might ask in #ubuntu
[08:19] <nentis> gotta run
=== RichEd-1 is now known as RichEd
[09:13] <highvoltage> hey Harrison___
[09:14] <highvoltage> Harrison___: do you perhaps know which display card is in the laptop? let us know if you get it working, please.
[09:26] <tuukka> hi! i've created a file to /etc/X11/Xsession.d/ which works as a login script. but any ideas of where i should put corresponding logout script??
[09:54] <jsgotangco> highvoltage
[09:55] <jsgotangco> wtf is with that facebook invie
[09:55] <jsgotangco> "Jonathan wants to know your true sexuality"
[09:56]  * RichEd winks at jsgotangco 
[09:56] <jsgotangco> haha
[10:15] <highvoltage> jsgotangco: heh, it was a stupid test and you had to invite 20 people to get the answer :)
[10:15] <jsgotangco> haha
[10:15] <jsgotangco> facebook wasteland
[10:15] <highvoltage> jsgotangco: safe to ignore and there was no any added meaning to it
[10:15] <jsgotangco> nahhh
[10:16] <jsgotangco> everything in facebook is dumb anyways
[10:16] <highvoltage> I want to try to avoid facebook, but it is evil. like IRC.
[10:16] <highvoltage> and now I've kind of been sucked in by twitter and wikia too
[10:16] <jsgotangco> twitter is ok
[10:16] <highvoltage> twitter doesn't have all these dumb "apps", at least.
[10:17] <jsgotangco> add me heh
[10:17] <jsgotangco> JeromeGotangco
[10:17] <highvoltage> ok
[10:56] <RichEd> jsgotangco & highvoltage: i did not check my own personal facebook profile for 2 weeks over xmas
[10:56] <RichEd> when i went back ... i did not even recognise it ... a viral explosion of apps, and messages telling me who had just wiped their bum, and who's dog was feeling depressed
[10:56] <RichEd> like i really need that in my life :/
[10:57] <jsgotangco> yeah
[10:57] <jsgotangco> don't ever install x poke and that silly stuff!
[11:31] <highvoltage> Riddell: hehe
[11:31] <highvoltage> ugh, sorry again, I meant RichEd
[12:39] <highvoltage> what kind of DSL connections do you guys have at home these days?
[13:05]  * ogra has 2M symmetrical here
[13:07] <joe__> anyone alive?
[13:11] <Harrison___> graphics card is an ati radeon xpress 200m does this support desktop effects, it is supported by the restricted driver
[14:07] <joe__> Anyone know how to manage users in edubuntu?
[14:10] <RichEd> joe__: same as ubuntu ... have you looked for help on help.ubuntu ? or the wiki ?
[14:10] <joe__> Hmm... I think I just need to keep playing.
[14:10] <joe__> I find users created on the server do no propagate to the clients.
[14:11] <ogra> there are no users on clients
[14:11] <joe__> will 7.10 clients work on 7.04 server?
[14:11] <ogra> (teh client sessions run on the server, the server needs the users )
[14:11] <ogra> no
[14:11] <joe__> hmm.
[14:12] <ogra> the whole design of servige the rootfs has changed between 7.04 and 7.10
[14:12] <ogra> *serving
[14:12] <joe__> cool.
[14:13] <joe__> I am trying to get this elementary school lab running (the guy who set it up is gone)
[14:13] <joe__> some are edubuntu, some are ubuntu, all seem to be connected to the server.
[14:21] <laga> hey guys :) i suspect some people in here are using diskless clients. i'd like to add support for diskless clients to mythbuntu but i'm encountering an odd issue: no matter what i do, nfsmount inside the initramfs will always mount the root share read-only. is that normal behavior?
[14:25] <joe__> Hey guys -- is it possible to run a lab with *some* clients diskless and others not?
[14:25] <ogra> laga, yes
[14:26] <laga> ogra: do you know why that happens?
[14:28] <ogra> laga, thats the dsign :) the clients boot with the writable bits in tmp ... its a security thing since theer is nothing running on the client thats not actually needed to connect to the server and execute a session there
[14:29] <ogra> s/in tmp/in a tmpfs/
[14:29] <ogra> sorry
[14:29] <ogra> the clients have no users or anything, all tehy do is boot into a login manager that then starts an ssh session to the server where it executes a session
[14:29] <laga> ogra: from what i've read in the ubuntu wiki, that's your (edubuntu) design. however, the initramfs script provide the facilities to mount the nfs root writeable.
[14:30] <ogra> right
[14:30] <ogra> but i wouldnt suggest that
[14:30] <laga> ogra: i will not use your scripts (sorry if i made it sound like that), i was just wondering if anyone has made experiencies similar to mine
[14:30] <ogra> there are many files that get changed at every boot
[14:30] <laga> ogra: i'll be using unionfs with that, no worries.
[14:30] <ogra> if you have more than one client it will break
[14:30] <ogra> we use unionfs
[14:31] <laga> my problem actually is that i can't mount any shares rw in initramfs. but the root share would be a good start. :)
[14:31] <ogra> (we dont use nfs anymore since gutsy since that had massive speed probelms)
[14:31] <ogra> you dont want root to be writable trust me :)
[14:31] <laga> yes, you use unionfs in gutsy. with nbd and squashfs, which is a really nifty approach :) just discovered that a few minutes ago
[14:31] <ogra> you can create an fstab in the squashfs image to mount diffferent shares easily
[14:32] <laga> ogra: i do not want root to be writeable. i just want to be able to mount a nfs share rw.
[14:32] <ogra> i'd rather suggest that
[14:32] <ogra> right
[14:32] <ogra> make sure nfs-common is installed in the image
[14:33] <ogra> (its not in the default ubuntu bootstrap selection anymore, so not installed on thin clients)
[14:34] <laga> thanks, but i don't want to use squashfs. :) i was just wondering if anyone was unable to mount nfs shares rw in the initramfs that comes with ubuntu.
[14:34] <ogra> everyone
[14:34] <ogra> (as i explained above, no nfs client bits are in the image)
[14:35] <ogra> your mileage will vary if you want to use ltsp without squashfs though
[14:36] <ogra> its what we default to since a while
[14:38] <laga> thanks.
[14:38] <ogra> and the old nfs chroot might go away in hardy, not sure yet
[14:38] <ogra> we currently keep it for easier maintenance of the image
[14:38] <laga> i should have made it clearer that i didn't even want to use ltsp in the first place :)
[14:38] <ogra> but there is an image shell that makes it possible to drop the 400M of cruft
[14:39] <ogra> well, it would be cool if you could integrate it in ltsp :)
[14:39] <ogra> i was planning a myth mode myself since quite some time .... given that its likely only a five line pulgin that would be needed it shoudl be fairly easy
[14:39] <laga> yes, but we need fat clients :)
[14:40] <ogra> why ?
[14:40] <ogra> you need a player and a frontend to the db server, no ?
[14:40] <ogra> (at least thats how i always understood mythtv)
[14:40] <laga> back then, a few years ago, i wanted to add mythfrontend to LBE. i failed horribly. :)
[14:40] <ogra> which means two additional package to install and probably some tweaks to the ltsp defaults
[14:40] <laga> ogra: mythfrontend ( = player software) needs to be run as local app.
[14:41] <ogra> right
[14:41] <ogra> so you should actually be able to just install the mythfrontend package in the chroot and thats it
[14:41] <ogra> have you ever looked at ltsp plugins ?
[14:41] <laga> how do you run local apps in ltsp these days? back then, you had to do ssh magic
[14:42] <ogra> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HowtoWriteLTSP5Plugins
[14:42] <ogra> we dont have localapp support ready yet for ltsp5
[14:43] <ogra> but the approach is to use xatoms and on the session side some xdg overlays
[14:43] <ogra> ldm makes that pretty easy
[14:43] <ogra> since we just need to send the data through the ssh tunnel ...
[14:44] <laga> excuse my ignorance. what does "ldm" stand for?
[14:45] <ogra> ltsp display manager
[14:45] <ogra> the login manager used in ltsp5
[14:45] <ogra> (we dont do xdmcp anymore)
[14:46] <laga> ah
[14:46] <ogra> ldm by default does: ssh -X user@server /etc/X11/Xsession
[14:47] <ogra> it also has a mode that omits -X and sets DISPLAY to the clients display .... so you keep ssh password handling while having the speed of old XDMCP sessions
[14:48] <ogra> anyway, have a look at the kiosk plugin described on that wikipage ... its running a local firefox (teh code is buggy though, its just a rought example) ... seems similar to what you want
[14:49] <laga> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTSPFatClients?highlight=%28ltsp%29 <- i suppose this has not been implemented yet?
[14:49] <ogra> (replace ff with your mythfrontend, add nfs-common to the chroot ...
[14:49] <ogra> nope
[14:49] <laga> sad
[14:49] <ogra> it depends on a network auth mechanism we dotn have
[14:50] <ogra> with the new squashfs/unionfs architecture it should be trivial though
[14:50] <ogra> (to do it yourself)
[14:50] <laga> true
[14:51] <laga> how big is such a squashfs image compressed/uncompressed? i kinda liked the idea of using the server's /
[14:51] <ogra> the nfs implementation would have been tricky though .... sicne nfs and unionfs in ubuntu dont like each ther you would ave to do a lot of bind mounting etc
[14:51] <laga> (read-only, of course. i'm not insane :))
[14:52] <ogra> -rwxr--r-- 1 root root 158M 2007-12-29 17:47 i386.img
[14:52] <laga> oh, what's the matter with nfs and unionfs? i know there's some special handling for nfs in unionfs but i think i've read it's not necessary anymore in recent kernels
[14:52] <laga> sounds sensible
[14:52] <laga> although we probably have to add 100M (uncompressed) for mythtv
[14:52] <ogra> well, it didnt work in gutsy, nfs/unionfs just broke back then
[14:53] <ogra> since we stepped away from insecure nfs completely in ltsp upstream i didnt look since gutsy started
[14:53] <laga> unionfs was broken badly earlier in gutsy but it's been working fine since the release
[14:54] <ogra> not to mention that nfs is about 5X slower in booting than the nbd/squashfs/unionfs combo
[14:55] <laga> how long does it take your clients to boot into X?
[14:57] <ogra> 50-70sec depending on the client (nothing faster than 1GHz here, max 128M)
[14:58] <laga> sounds good enough.
[14:58] <ogra> with nfs that went above 2min for some
[14:59] <laga> i'd expect that more RAM would speed that up a bit. and running a mythtv frontend in 128M is silly (yet i do it and wit works reasonably well)
[14:59] <ogra> yeah, 256 would be minimum i guess
[15:00] <laga> 512M would be better. DDRII-RAM is cheap enough if you buy a new box.
[15:03] <laga> ogra: you almost convinced me. :) i suppose i could ask one last question: do i _need_ a dhcp server? many epople will already have SoHo-routers with their own dhcpds. for our first attempt at netbooting in mythbuntu 8.04, i was just going to create a simple script which created a bootable usb pen drive/CD-ROM where the bootloader would pass all necessary options like nfsroot=10.0.0.1:/ and ip=dhcp. would that still be possible with ltsp?
[15:04] <ogra> you need a dhcp server to hand out the boot info
[15:04] <ogra> ltsp has two server packages
[15:04] <ogra> ltsp-server and ltsp-server-standalone
[15:04] <ogra> the latter depends on dhcpd3
[15:04] <laga> yeah, ltsp-server-standalone comes with a dhcpd.
[15:04] <ogra> if you dont use a local dhcpd you need to set up the other in the right way to serve the tftp info
[15:05] <laga> well, tftp is just used to download kernel + initrd, right?
[15:05] <ogra> edubuntu uses a two NIC install by default for its server ... that way one NIC can be dhcp client at a ruter and the second serves the TC network (including a dedicated dhcpd)
[15:06] <laga> let me guess: if i want to use one NIC, i need to add an IP alias to that interface?
[15:07] <ogra> no
[15:08] <ogra> if you want one NIC you need to make sure there is no other dhcpd in your network or configure that one correctly for netbooting
[15:09] <laga> let's see: dhcp to tell the PXE stack to download pxelinux, pxelinux then downloads its config file and loads kernel + initrd, right? is it used for anything else?
[15:11] <ogra> well giving out the IP :)
[15:11] <ogra> but yes thats about it
[15:11] <ogra> ther is tftp involved in some pieces :)
[15:12] <laga> ok. let me replace tftp by putting the bootloader, the kernel and the initrd on a usb pen drive.
[15:13] <laga> now we just need the dhcpd. assuming i can just pass in all needed options as a boot option for the kernel/initramfs, i should be fine.
[15:13] <laga> i guess i need to look at your scripts
[15:13] <laga> thanks a lot, you have beena great inspiration!
[15:34] <laga> ogra: just looked at your initramfs scripts. is there any reason why you're (seeminglxy) duplicating work in init-bottom/unionfs_cow and scripts/ltsp-nbd ?
=== jean is now known as jbrefort
[18:25] <bddebian> Heya
=== juliux_ is now known as juliux