AMD64 as server...but LTSP clients complain about not being amd64?

[Oliver Grawert]

hi,
On Di, 2006-08-22 at 16:20 -0500, Vern Graner wrote:
> Ok, so I have an AMD64 3500 processor based server running Edubuntu 6.06 
> natively installed on the hard drive. I used the AMD64 ISO media so as 
> to get maximum performance from the AMD processor.
> 
> I then setup a little Dell Optiplex 800mhz PIII machine to use PXE and 
> remote boot from the server. It gets an address via DHCP, then it spits 
> out an error:
> 
> "This is not an amd64 machine. Please install the i386 version of Ubuntu"
> 
> This is perplexing, as operating as a Terminal server is resource 
> intensive, I had assumed that using the AMD64 version of edubuntu would 
> be appropriate to obtain max performance from the server hardware.
> 
> So, before I do a wipe and reinstall of the amd64 server with the i386 
> iso, is there a way to get the server to give out the i386 image via PXE?
there is one technical problem with setting up ltsp from an amd64 CD for
i386 clients ... our ltsp implementation uses the default ubuntu
packages to build the client environment so it can only use the packages
available on the CD ... in case of amd64 these are amd64 packages ...
there is sadly no space on the CD to put both architectures in, so we
had to take the choice of leaving out the ltsp setup completely or to
create a client environment with the same arch (even though its very
unlikely that anyone uses amd64 clients, its better that not having a
setup at all.)

in case you want to run i386 clients on an amd64 server, i'd recommend
to just create a i386 environment with packages from the archive on your
amd64 server ... you dont need the LTSPCrossArchSetup wikipage for that
(thats only needed for CPU architectures that cant run the setup, like
powerpc iMacs on an i386 server for example (amd64 is able to execute
i386 code))

just do the following:

sudo rm -r /opt/ltsp/amd64
sudo ltsp-build-client --arch i386

after the setup finished you have a running environment for i386
clients :)

if you have an i386 CD around, you can even speed it up by running it
from CD instead:

mount cdrom 
sudo ltsp-build-client --arch i386 --mirror file:///cdrom

ciao
	oli