Hi all, thanks for your advice. This is the first time Ive been able to log onto the forum all day, as it has just not been responding
Thank you for the links Aitch I will read up on them now.
On the whole, its been another unproductive day. Ive installed FreeNAS on my laptop, and managed to set it up with various samba shares (boy....FreeBSD is another world!) I connected it by ethernet to the hub upstairs and upload the initrd.gz and vmlinuz files out via tftp, and tried to boot another laptop that I have in for repair (no hard drive) via PXE off it, no luck, just a message about PXE timing out. It obviously cant "see" the tftp server on the FreeNAS. I even lugged my desktop machine upstairs as a double check, and set it up on the floor connected with ethernet and the same thing happened.
TFTP has only just been implemented on FreeNAS in the very latest release....I really think it is untested and broken...I could be wrong, but thats how it seems. In any case, FreeNAS is an excellent project and Im glad that I learned about it, just for the knowledge that you can use an old laptop with a broken screen to bittorrent (via transmission) all night on minimal power, then stream the content off their onto an xbox360 or PS2 using "Universal Plug and Play" or UPnP (this should be a proprietary windoze thing).
Im going to go back to the smoothwall setup described above (without the hub), Im not sure how it will work but its worth a shot. The tftp server on there seems to be more mature. In the documentation for puppy linux, its been reported that some success has been had using ubuntu to boot the puppy machines from. I would rather steer well clear of Ubuntu if possible because Ive found it to be extremely unreliable. The other way I could test things is using Virtual Machines.....but that isnt a really true test....as I will eventually be using real ones
@rcrsn51
Thanks for the idea. I would rather not have to use a pup_save.2fs file for the moment, or any form of storage on the client machines...for three reasons.
1. Puppy linux *should* be able to perform the majority of tasks by the majority of "linux newbs" simply from liveboot...if it doesnt then weve discovered where we can improve puppy linux!
2. This is also for security considerations, as it would be possible for people to leave passwords and such stored in them, and also any other kind of "material" that passers by would leave behind.
3. Hard disks have moving parts and are prone to failure before any other component of the p.c. SSD disks are much more reliable, but expensive The cost of replacing all of the hard drives in all of the machines would be prohibitive. Better the whole cybercafe be run off a single SSD RAID array in a server for maximum reliability.
The cafe does have a regular clientèle from the local area however, there is nothing to say that they couldnt use their own pendrive to store a personalised pup_save.2fs file. They would just have to insert it before booting the computers for it to be picked up...I think Im correct in thinking this?
@ Dougal
I would be very interested in your autoconfiguring xorgwizard, does it just autoconfigure the mouse or attempt the whole x-settings? Even if it just did the mouse it would be an improvement. Have you published it? do you have a link?
Remember, this is not just a "normal" cybercafe, it has people from all over the world visiting it. An ability to (easily) choose the keyboard layout for the users native country would be a great feature to have here, and while I agree that "normally" the screen resolution would be preconfigured, an ability to adjust that before the session starts to the users preference would not exactly be a drawback as such.....if that facility was to be relatively user friendly.
The staff at the cybercafe indicated that they have a great deal of support for the aims and objectives of the Puppy Linux project (Green technology, recycling, "free" software etc), and I have explained to them they may have some initial problems while we get the exact setup sorted out. Whatever Puppy Linux's downfalls at present they will be nothing compared to the trouble of having to keep so may Windows machines quasi-operational. Its a "Win Win", unless your surname happens to be Gates or Balmer that is
I do expect that there is a possibility that some machines may not "autoconfigure" their settings. Puppy has a great facility of "remembering" the xorg settings for different machines. This is so that if a user is using LiveCD or USB installation on a few different machines regularly, puppy "remembers" the settings for each graphic card/monitor combination, and the next time it boots it recalls them and displays how it was last (manually) set up.
If there is a "problem machine" then it would be a relatively simple task of configuring the problem machine manually, and then taking those settings (the xorg.conf) and manually adding them to the pup_420.sfs held on the netboot server (this can be done online without a visit by me remember). That way, when puppy boots on that machine, the settings for it are already automatically programmed in. Im assuming this is possible
Thanks again for all of your suggestions and support.