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Author Topic: New user - custom PXE image  (Read 1853 times)

Offline whoiswes

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New user - custom PXE image
« on: March 02, 2010, 01:21:03 PM »
Hi all,

First off, let me apologize in advance if what I'm asking is answered elsewhere in the forums and/or wiki.  I'm still trying to get my head around TCL and may have missed some fairly obvious things, so please be gentle.

That being said, here's what I'm trying to do:

We have a number of thin and thick clients in our office that I would like to PXE boot off our TFTP server.  Currently we use ThinStation (www.thinstation.org) and have several desktop shortcuts pointed at various terminal servers in our data center.  This system works great but unfortunately ThinStation is getting a little long in the tooth and new hardware doesn't seem to want to work.

So, in a nutshell, I'd like to have a net-bootable TinyCoreLinux "image" on our TFTP server.  The image should be read-only and pull all of the apps/settings/packages off the TFTP server as well.  The user interface should be as minimal as possible so that end users cannot access any applications or settings.

So far, I've gotten netboot working (easy), install of TCZ packages off the tftp server working (easy), and am now trying to figure out the easiest way to get RDesktop shortcuts set up on the desktop or in the menu, and remove the context menu entries and whatnot.

As much as possible, I'd like to do this in an extension or series of extensions for code portability across TCL versions and to keep upgrades as simple as possible.

Any advice would be appreciated.  Thanks for reading and again, apologies for any obvious oversights.

Wes

Offline curaga

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Re: New user - custom PXE image
« Reply #1 on: March 03, 2010, 07:24:22 AM »
AFAIK the only desktop icon-providing extensions currently are xfce and pcmanfm. If you mean the bottom bar, last I checked the base file is /usr/share/wbar/dot.wbar. You can add or remove needed entries there.

An extension by default however does not overwrite existing files. Thus you'd need to do it in the startup script, for example store your modified file in /usr/share/mydir and copy it over the base file.

The default menu entries are in /etc/skel/.wmx. However, since they are copied to /home/tc before extensions are loaded, your startup script would need to remove the unwanted ones from /home/tc/.wmx. Or, if you have a lot of changes, remove everything and untar your tarball, for example.
The only barriers that can stop you are the ones you create yourself.