On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 12:56:07AM +0100, Chris Phillips wrote: > > I am trying to find a suitable alternative to our crappy, solid-state, > thin client boxes (because they are so awfully unreliable & the > manufacturer has also gone down the tubes). > > We need a fairly painless way, to roll out a fresh install onto some > random i386 hardware we have lying around (there's a plentiful supply), > for any new users, who require a basic functioning GUI, with access to > graphical email client, web browser & 'rdesktop' (for the windows > applications, that they are all hooked on).
You may also try to use your PCs as thin clients. Check out http://www.thinbsd.org/ , it is a small FreeBSD based system to create X11 or Windows terminals. (Don't be afraid by the release dates, the project is not dead). > What I'd love to be able to do, is to create a FreeBSD (it's my > favorite) CD, that contains all that I need for these basic systems. > Either, set up so that the install is automated, with just the minimal > of setup, or so that it's got all the packages that I want & can all be > installed straight off the CD (perhaps by choosing the "All Packages" > option). > > Is what I've described actually possible? There are informations to script the install process in sysinstall(8) I had to install FreeBSD and Linux on dozens of workstations before and found out the CD thing was not the most practicable way. I ended up doing a fairly complete install on a master machine and cloning it via PXE booting and dd (disks were identicals). Check out this paper for a similar technique: http://www.pix.net/software/pxeboot/archive/SANE.pdf -- Francois Tigeot _______________________________________________ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
