Cross platform failure

[Andrew Hobbs]

Installed ltsp-server-standalone (Breezy Badger) on a Mac Mini to serve PXE boot i386 machines. ltsp-build-client script assumes current platform and tried to install powerpc client packages, failing.

Work around:
Installed ltsp-server on i386 spare machine running Breezy, ran ltsp-build-client then relocated /opt/ltsp/i386 and /var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp from i386 machine to powerpc.

Clients boot fine after relocating those two directories. Is it possible to either set ltsp-build-client to build i386 (most common) no matter the platform, or to specify the actual target architecture?

[Yagisan (yagisan)]

Currently no, you can't have the server as powerpc and the client as i386/amd64, or amd64/i386 as server and powerpc as the client.

Dapper has been adjusted so that you can have i386 clients with amd64 as the server. Best Regards

Yagisan

[Andrew Hobbs (andrew-tjts)]

Interestingly, what I did as a work around was to deploy the i386
client components on a P4 box I had lying around and doing a straight
tar copy of the directories.

Works just fine, would be nice to have the option to do it without
having to touch another machine however. Perhaps a i386 support deb
for powerpc servers?

On Jan 14, 2006, at 9:04 AM, Yagisan wrote:

> Public bug report changed:
> https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/3428
>
> Comment:
> Currently no, you can't have the server as powerpc and the client as
> i386/amd64, or amd64/i386 as server and powerpc as the client.
>
> Dapper has been adjusted so that you can have i386 clients with
> amd64 as
> the server. Best Regards
>
> Yagisan

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

thats technically not possible without a CPU emulator. to build the chroot environment the host architecture *must* be able to execute the binarys of the guest architecture. while that works fine for amd64/i386 mixed architectures, it doesnt work with powerpc/i386 (or i386/powerpc). i did some testing with quemu, but its still to immature to achieve the task. the general answer i give to people asking in #edubuntu is to export the nfs root read write to a client machine running a liveCD on which you then run the ltsp-build-client script. (indeed you should make the nfsroot readonly again afterwards)