This is an old revision of the document!
:: This whole process could probably streamlined into an x2go-tce.deb
Ideas:
During the time of Debian Wheezy being Debian's stable release, we started developing a new ThinClientEdition (TCE) - one that is based on Debian-Live and thus does no longer rely on NFS. Instead, the entire image is loaded into the RAM of the ThinClient machine.
The disadvantage is that your ThinClient now needs at least 1 GB of RAM (see below).
However, the huge advantage is that there no longer is a need for any high-availibility setup concerning NFS. All you need is an HTTP or FTP server with a dedicated IP, if you want to use netbooting. It is also possible to deploy the image to the ThinClient's local storage, if present, and have it update in the background. Also, making changes/updating the NFS-based TCE was rather finicky - with the current TCE, you build and deploy a new image every time you make a change, and you can test it on a single client without interrupting your production environment.
We've also received reports that the old NFS-based TCE wouldn't work with Jessie, or at least it was very hard to get it to work. Our current TCE works just fine with Jessie, and we expect it to work in Stretch and hopefully in Buster (Stretch+1) as well. The one catch is that the live-build package in Debian/the Debian-Live project is currently looking for a new maintainer - so there is a slim chance that live-build might be removed from Debian Buster, especially if no new maintainer steps up and the live-build replacement that is currently in the works contains all the required functionality of live-build by then.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git-core lzma live-build live-config-doc live-manual-html live-boot-doc
# Point this to the git repository you wish to use export LBX2GO_CONFIG='http://git-server-and-project::branch' # Select ONE of the following LBX2GO_ARCH lines and comment out the others # (feel free to use long or short options) # for 64-Bit builds, use: # export LBX2GO_ARCH='-a amd64 -k amd64' # 32-Bit, larger memory footprint, but faster performance on i686 and newer # export LBX2GO_ARCH='-a i386 -k 686-pae' # 32-Bit, smallest memory footprint export LBX2GO_ARCH='--architectures i386 --linux-flavours 586' # These options are meant to reduce the image size. # Feel free to adapt them after consulting "man lb_config" export LBX2GO_SPACE='--checksums none --apt-indices none --cache false --win32-loader false --memtest none --firmware-binary false --initramfs-compression lzma' # These are default values that should not require tuning export LBX2GO_DEFAULTS='--initsystem sysvinit --security true --updates true --apt-recommends false --firmware-chroot true --backports true' export LBX2GO_ARCHIVE_AREAS="main contrib non-free"
Change to a directory where you want to save your builds, and run the following commands:
# Set everything up for netboot-image creation LBX2GO_IMAGETYPE='netboot' # Create Timestamp LBX2GO_TIMESTAMP=$(date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S") # Set Directory name LBX2GO_TCEDIR=./live-build-x2go-$LBX2GO_TIMESTAMP if [ -z "$LBX2GO_ARCH" ] || [ -z "$LBX2GO_SPACE" ] || [ -z "$LBX2GO_CONFIG" ] || [ -z "$LBX2GO_DEFAULTS" ] || [ -z "$LBX2GO_IMAGETYPE" ] || [ -z "$LBX2GO_TIMESTAMP" ] || [ -z "$LBX2GO_ARCHIVE_AREAS" ]; then echo -e "One or more of the following variables is unset:" echo -e "LBX2GO_ARCH: '${LBX2GO_ARCH}'" echo -e "LBX2GO_SPACE: '${LBX2GO_SPACE}'" echo -e "LBX2GO_DEFAULTS: '${LBX2GO_DEFAULTS}'" echo -e "LBX2GO_CONFIG: '${LBX2GO_CONFIG}'" echo -e "LBX2GO_IMAGETYPE: '${LBX2GO_IMAGETYPE}'" echo -e "LBX2GO_TIMESTAMP: '${LBX2GO_TIMESTAMP}'" echo -e "LBX2GO_ARCHIVE_AREAS: '${LBX2GO_ARCHIVE_AREAS}'" echo -e "Please visit http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:howto:tce" echo -e "and read up on the general prerequisites for X2Go-TCE" else # This will create a timestamped subdirectory for the build mkdir -p $LBX2GO_TCEDIR cd $LBX2GO_TCEDIR lb config $LBX2GO_ARCH $LBX2GO_SPACE $LBX2GO_DEFAULTS \ --config $LBX2GO_CONFIG --binary-images $LBX2GO_IMAGETYPE \ --archive-areas "$LBX2GO_ARCHIVE_AREAS" if lb build ; then echo -e "Build is done: '$LBX2GO_TCEDIR'" ln ./tftpboot/live/vmlinuz ./x2go-tce-vmlinuz ln ./tftpboot/live/initrd.img ./x2go-tce-initrd.img ln ./binary/live/filesystem.squashfs ./x2go-tce-filesystem.squashfs lb clean rm -rf ./cache else echo -e "Build failed: '$LBX2GO_TCEDIR'" fi cd .. fi