Using Ubuntu 10.04 ltsp workstations as character terminals

I've finally got round to updating our LTSP setup to use Lucid. We have a number of LTSP terminals that work just at the character terminal level, with the screens doing a telnet into another system and with no X Window running on them at all.

Lucid's switch to the Plymouth startup system has an interesting side effect with this - namely that with the default setup, you are left just looking at the Plymouth screen and are not able to access any of the VTs to do anything else.

The solution is a custom entry in the pxelinux.cfg directory relevant to the Lucid boot set (in my case /srv/tftp/ltsp/lucidi386/pxelinux.cfg - note the change from previous versions where /var/lib/tftpboot has been replaced by /srv/tftp)

I've rearranged the IP addresses of my text only workstations so that they are all in a block of 16 IP addresses which will look for the same config file using the hex address notation that PXE uses. Then in that file I put

default ltsp-text

label ltsp-text
kernel vmlinuz
append ro initrd=initrd.img quiet splash nbdport=2004 vga=normal nomodeset

This has the added advantage that the console stays at 80x30 characters which is very usable for the application that we are using.