[Thinbsd] configuration

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "francis stanbridge" <fbs at cocobc.org>
To: <thinbsd at cogidis.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 1:23 PM
Subject: [Thinbsd] configuration


> Long time BSD user, have not yet downloaded & set up thinBSD server
> yet.  Have looked at the documentation on the website.  Is there a
> config file where I can tell client machines the resolution to use
> e.g. 800x600, 1024/768 etc resolutions or do I pass the parameters
> through rdesktop?  If there is a config are machines id by  mac
> and/or ip ?
>
> I run ICT in a school and have a large quantity (250 rising to 400+
> this year) of 'old' donated pcs as thin clients (though old is now
> becoming piii 700 +..) - the problem is monitors that cannot keep up
> with newer graphics cards (monitors die sooner than pcs).

I had to do that because I use it with a 16:9 plasma hdtv as the display, 
which needs a non-standard resolution and specific vert/horz refresh rates.
I do it by mounting the thinbsd image as a ramdisk
(gunzip, mdconfig, mount)

and editing the template xorg.conf in /<mountpoint>/etc/X11

during boot up, there is a rc script that reads this template and generates 
xorg.conf on the fly.
so make changes in the template

The box I do this on is down at the moment because I'm in the middle of a 
water cooling project so I can't provide exact examples from my working 
setup for a few days.

I find myself tweaking the stuff enough that I made little mount/unmount 
scripts to automate the gunzip-mdconfig-mount / umount-mdconfig-gzip steps.
That's why I really want to make a nfs root version but I haven't got that 
working yet.

ideally this type of option should be passed via dhcp so different stations 
can have different screen sizes.

You could edit the rc script (it's in /usr/local/etc/rc.d I beleive) to 
provide some hack of your own, like looking for a text file matching the 
hostname or ip address (of the station) and reading various config values 
from it. If wget or curl, or even nc (netcat)  is in the thinbsd image then 
these per-station config files wouldn't even have to be maintained inside 
the fs image. Actually, I know at least ftp is in the image so you could use 
ftp as a last resort.

Be advised, when the image is unzipped, a booting station will still see it 
and read it just fine, but if the unzipped image is also mounted, a booting 
station will crash when it tries to mount the image because although it 
downloaded it's own copy of the image into ram and it can't actually hurt 
the server copy, it's still flagged as dirty and mounted and the mount 
command refuses to mount it. So you do always want to mount/edit/umount and 
stay mounted as rarely and briefly as possible.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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