K12LTSP 6.0-64bit Config walk through
From K12LTSP Wiki
(This document is a work in progress... -- PN 7/25/2007) Walkthrough for install of K12LTSP 6.0-64bit on a PowerEdge 860. This server has a single, Quad-core, Intel Xeon cpu, 8 gigs of ram and two Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drives. We expect to power one lab of 30 K12LTSP clients and an additional 15 workstations located throughout the school.
Install K12TLSP
Using the CDrom media, K12LTSP 6.0 installed with no problems. Just unpack the server, put in CD #1 and accept all the defaults for install. Let K12LTSP create the partitions. We didn't create any users as this box with authenticate off of an Active Directory server.
Update K12LTSP
yum update
This produced a dependency error with the icewm window manager. I turned off fedora-extras by editing etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-extras.
vi etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-extras
Change enabled=1 to enabled=0 and then run yum update again. After updating, reboot and run yum clean all to clean up. You'll need to turn fedora-extras back on later to get the pulseaudio-devel package. Just change back to enabled=1 in fedora-extras.
yum update
yum clean all
HP Compac t5xxx note: Some HP t5000 clients use a via-rhine network card. If so, you'll need to install an older kernel for the thin-client. See | this post from the K12OSN list for links to download the kernel and how to install it.
Install Extras
Login as root and find the "Install additional software" folder. Open and install Acrobat and fonts by double clicking on the links to the scripts Eric wrote. These will install just fine.
64 bit Issues
There are problems when a 64bit version of Firefox tries to run java and flash plugins that are 32bit. There may be some other ways to do this and some are documented. For now, we'll do it the easy way and just use the 32bit version of Firefox.
To see which version (64bit vs 32bit) of packages are installed, add this line to etc/rpm/macros.
%_query_all_fmt %%{name}-%%{version}-%%{release}.%%{arch}
Now when you do an rpm -q on a package you'll see both 32bit and 64bit versions:
# rpm -q firefox firefox-1.5.0.12-4.fc6.x86_64 firefox-1.5.0.12-4.fc6.i386
We'll remove the 64bit version:
yum remove firefox-1.5.0.12-4.fc6.x86_64
Install JAVA plugin:
Now we can run the "Get JAVA" script in the "Install additional software" folder. Once we do that and restart Firefox, we can test the JAVA plugin by going to the | test site at Sun.com.
Java works but Sun tells me I should download a new version. I get the 32bit version, NOT the 64bit verison. It gets saved to my desktop as jre-6u2-linux-i586-rpm.bin. To extract this I have to make it excutable and then run the program.
# chmod u+x jre-6u2-linux-i586-rpm.bin # ./jre-6u2-linux-i586-rpm.bin
Once we run the application and it gets installed we need to see what plugin is linked in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins:
# ls -l /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ # libjavaplugin_oji.so -> /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.10/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugi
This means that there is still a link to the older plugin. Let's change that and link to the new one. To determine the correct path we'll use rpm -ql:
rpm -ql jre
A bunch of files go by but the one we're looking for is:
# /usr/java/jre1.6.0_02/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so
Now we'll remove the old link and create a new symbolic link in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins.
# rm /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so # ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_02/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so
Our last step is to install some GCC compatibility rpms. The 1.6 plugin will need these to work.
yum -y install compat-libstdc++-33 compat-libstdc++-296
Once we restart Firefox we can head back to the | test site at Sun.com and see if it works.
OK, JAVA works now, let's install Flash. We'll use some of the info on the getting Flash to work page .
Install Flash
First we'll install a few needed packages. Even though we're only listing 4 here, yum will install any extra packages that are required. Isn't yum nice!
# yum install libstdc++.so.5 pulseaudio-devel esound-devel libflashsupport
And then we can run the "Get flash" script from the "Install additional software" folder. The last thing we need to do is create a directory that will be needed for flash sound support.
# mkdir /tmp/.esd # touch /tmp/.esd/socket
This directory is in /tmp so it may be deleted from time to time. It may be a good idea to write a script that will recreate it every so often as flash sound will not work if the socket file is not there.
#!/bin/bash if [ ! -e /tmp/.esd/socket ]; then /bin/mkdir /tmp/.esd /bin/touch /tmp/.esd/socket fi
This little script comes from FaruqueAhmed on the | LTSP wiki. This page has lots of info and tips on LTSP and sound. Create a file with the text above and save it in /usr/local/bin/check-for-tmp-esd-socket.sh and make it executable.
chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/check-for-tmp-esd-socket.sh
Now we'll add an entry for it in crontab.
crontab -e */5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/check-for-tmp-esd-socket.sh 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null
Now you can restart Firefox and check to see if Flash and sound are working. You might want to listen to an | interview of Adam Frey from Wikispaces.com. Just click on the little arrow and the flash player should work and you should have sound!
Cool! ;-)
Many sites use Flash for media but we'll setup the server to handle some other media players too. To install some of these files we'll need to enable additional package repositories. Edit etc/yum.repos.d/k12ltsp-livna.repo and change enabled=0 to enabled=1. Then we can add packages to deal with media files.
First we'll get RealPlayer from Real.com/linux. Don't click on the link that says "Download Player." Instead look for the tiny link below it that says, "RedHat Package" and get that one. You'll end up with RealPlayer10GOLD.rpm which you can install with:
rpm -ivh --nosignature RealPlayer10GOLD.rpm. I added the --nosignature option because the rpm you'll download is not signed.
I'm stuck with RealPlay. I can get it to work with video on the terminal but I'm not getting sound. I'll have to come back to this later. It seems like I'm having problems with sound. I do have sound working with Flash. I think it's the mixture of 64bit and 32bit packages. More to follow...
