Re: Newbie Questions

Sorry, I apparently have a serious problem of not reading P.S.'s...gonna
have to make a new year's resolution on that one.

Quoting from a previous post:
Adding software to the image could be accomplished in many ways. The
next PXES release will include some options to pxesconfig to do this
(--include, --isoinclude, --install, --isointall).
By now the easiest way is to add it to
/opt/pxes-0.6/stock/dist/{bin|lib|etc}
to be sure it's included in the size calculation.
To make things easier on yourself, you will want to make sure that the
version of wine and the samba client were compiled against the same
glibc and any other shared libraries as the version of pxes you are
going to be using.

One way to know what files you need would be to start with a Linux
desktop that does not have wine or samba client installed on it at all.
Do a "find / > beforeInstall" and then install and configure wine and
samba client (or whatever program you want to add to your pxes image)
Once it is working to your satisfaction, do a "find / > afterInstall"
and then "diff beforeInstall afterInstall > filesNeedToCopy.txt" This
should give you an idea what files you need to copy to
/opt/pxes-0.6/stock/dist/{bin|lib|etc}. Once that is done, you can run
/opt/bin/pxesconfig, making sure to check the box to initialize the ram
disk so the new files will be added to the .nbi image.

Another way to know what files you need would would be to copy one file
at a time, starting with the /usr/bin/wine, create a .nbi image, boot
the thin client and try to run wine. It will fail because it can't find
a shared library file. You would then add each file until wine runs. The
advantage of this is that you should end up with fewer files and thus a
smaller image, however it the disadvantage is that the process may take
longer. I would probably use the first method and if there were any
files listed in "filesNeedToCopy.txt" that I thought I would not need,
just don't copy them and see if it works, for example, you probably
don't need winemine, winefile, winecfg, etc on the thin client.

Normally, wine creates a .wine folder in your home directory. I would
probably not include the .wine folder in the image, but would mount the
home directory with nfs or smbfs.

Of course, in the pxesconfig, you will need to select "Local X Windows
Session with simple desktop, window manager and applications" on the
Session Selection window.

I have not taken the time to actually successfully run wine on pxes yet,
and have not done much with adding programs to a pxes image, but in
theory it should work. There are probably easier ways to determine
exactly which files are needed to copy. Hopefully some others with more
experience will throw in some more ideas/tools to use.

Robert

On Sat, 2003-12-20 at 08:11, Alex Stewart wrote:

> > XDM server since it would be the more powerful machine compared
> 
> Not exactly. The idea behind a "render farm" is that the clients work 
> on frames of animation
> so they are powerful machines (p4 2.5GHZ with 1gig of ram) so running 
> all the render software
> on the server via xdm would defeat the purpose. Currently the entire 
> farm is running Win2k but
> the hard drives in the farm are starting to die. We bought um surplus 
> so not much we can do about it
> so I took this as an opportunity to try and get linux running on it so 
> we can use the farm with diskless
> clients (ie no money needed for new drives and we keep working)
> 
>   So my goal is to make a really small PXES with local x windows session 
> running wine.
> Thanx for the help
> -Alex
> 
> On Dec 19, 2003, at 10:43 PM, Robert Yaklin wrote:
> 
> > I use wine, but not with pxes. I assume you are using pxes to connect 
> > to
> > a XDM server. If I were to use it, I would probably install wine on the
> > XDM server since it would be the more powerful machine compared to the
> > thin clients, which by definition should be thin and not be running a
> > lot themselves.
> >
> > On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 19:15, Alex Stewart wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >> 	Im to new to all this. First would like to say yay it works!!! Now 
> >> for
> >> the
> >> questions.... I had to make a custom kernel to support my hardware and
> >> it worked
> >>   when I try to boot the system with the following.
> >>
> >> append ramdisk_size=16768 ro video=vesa vga=771 console=null
> >> initrd=pxes-0.6.initrd root=/dev/ram
> >>
> >> however when I tried to boot with write access (ro changed to rw) the
> >> system dies with Cant find DHCP server
> >> and cant initialize eth0......
> >>
> >> My other questions.... How would one go about mapping SMB drives? for
> >> instance I have a RH9 server set up,
> >> from my workstation I can simply do
> >> mount -t smbfs -o username=*******,password******
> >> //192.168.0.10/tftpboot /mnt/pxesbootland
> >>
> >> however PXES doesn't seem to support that method it dies with "no such
> >> device" error.....Is there a way to implement
> >>   mounting this way? And lastly kind of a shot in left field...any one
> >> out there using WINE with there diskless thinclient? Or
> >> does anyone have a suggestion on how to install the WINE package into 
> >> a
> >> PXES linux distro?
> >>
> >> Thanx a bunch
> >>
> >> -Alex
> >>
> >> PS - What Im attempting to do is get a Lightwave Screamer net render
> >> farm to run on a diskless render farm.
> >> And wanna on the things Lightwave is picky about is using mapped
> >> drives, and it only runs in windows... hence
> >> the use of wine. I have this hole thing working/tested on my RH9
> >> system, now its just a matter of reproducing it in
> >> PXES..... Thanx again, and sorry bout all the questions! ;)
> >>
> >>
> >>
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> >
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