Personal tools
You are here: Home → Secure thin X Terminal image (cd or disk)

Secure thin X Terminal image (cd or disk)

by JeP — last modified Apr 13, 2009 11:55 AM
Filed Under:

Do you like to reuse your old hardware (desktop or laptop) or would you like to have a single server to maintain which you can connect to from multiple dumb terminals? This article will guide you step-by-step to make a live image (cd or disk) that can connect to a remote server (X session on the remote server over secure ssh connection) . This image can also be used on systems where ordinary ltsp clients network boot (wireless laptop, pcmcia network cards) does not work. I imagine this would provide solutions to use an old laptops with pcmcia network or with wireless as a Thin Client device, that can connect to a central (LTSP) GNU/Linux server.

To take advantage of the the latest possibilities, we use the latest version from a bootstrapped Debian Sid. We will work from within that chroot environment to build the Debian Lenny LDM secure X terminal live cdrom. Lets go through the process step by step.

  • First prepare our build environment. Bootstrap a Debian Sid version:
debootstrap sid sid-chroot http://debian.org/debian

 This takes some time, it makes a base debian Sid filesystem in sid-chroot.

  • Enter the new filesystem with chroot:
chroot sid-chroot

 Now you are in the new Sid environment.

  • We need the Debian live-helper package, so let's install it:
apt-get install live-helper
wget http://www.duyx.nl/download/minilive-ldm.sh
  •  Run the script to make the binary iso that contains LDM and xorg etc:
./minilive-ldm.sh lenny

 This wil start building a Debian Lenny system, install the requiered packages and finally make a binary.iso.

 Have a coffee or whatever you do when you wait.

 In the mean time while waiting, please feel free to review my script, and help me figure out a smart way to automagically install the host key from  the target LDM_SERVER on the live system. Without this, the LDM login failes  ... it uses ssh, and ssh needs to have been authenticated with the ssh server on the target host. ...

 A workaround is to add the ssh-key manually. After starting the live system, switch to a terminal console (eg: CRT-ALT-F1) and run "sudo ssh LDM_SERVER", where LDM_SERVER is the address of your local ssh capableb terminal server.

 

 If everything went well (depending on network connection, a working debian mirror and other things that might go wrong), you will have a folder named ldm-live-lenny where you will find the binary.iso.

 When finnished building the binary.iso exit the sid chroot environment with the command "exit", to return to your normal Debian system.

  • You could test the file before burning it to a cdrom with qemu.
apt-get install qemu
qemu -cdrom ~/sid-chroot/ldm-live-lenny/binary.iso
  •  If the binary.iso workes fine, burn it to cd:
wodim binary.iso

 Hope this information is usefull  (i guess so if you continued reading untill here:) )

Document Actions