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PostPosted: Sun May 24, 2009 10:55 pm 
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Hi all,

I have an MBE & 2 diskless FEs (love that) all running AGP-based FX5200 cards right now (did that on purpose to keep things simple). Running R5F27, current installed nVidia driver appears to be 1.0.7185.

I was running SD everywhere but today I got a 32" LCD for $300 in BestBuy. I also had a PCI-based 8400GS card waiting in the wings (it has DVI, the 5200s do not). So now it is time to upgrade the card & drivers on one of the FEs, but I'm not even sure if this is possible? I searched around and only found threads talking about using completely different chipsets (i.e. VIA & nVidia) on the diskless FE vs the MBE.

I believe my 5200 systems are only supported using the legacy nVidia drivers but my 8400 should be using the latest drivers (180.51 on their website). Hence the issue - is it possible to have the legacy used on 2 systems while the newest on the third?

The BE is never used to watch TV, I can easily flip it back to the onboard intel chipset in xorg.conf, but I need the 2 FEs working and one has 5200 while the other will have the 8400 chipset.

As my FE is a P4 2.66GHz it would be nice to take advantage of VDPAU eventually also but I can deal with that after I get the basics right..

I haven't tried installing any new nVidia drivers anywhere yet in case I mess things up, I thought I'd better check here first.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance...

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PostPosted: Mon May 25, 2009 3:31 am 
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Your MBE doesn't care what graphics driver your FE machines are using. Shouldn't be a problem at all. In theory, you should be able to d/l and install the driver from nvidia's website, but I have no idea how it'll play with R5F27.

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PostPosted: Mon May 25, 2009 11:42 am 
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Thx for the reply. I was just nervous as some of the wikis below indicate kernel-level chgs and I believe my diskless-setup shares one kernel with all machines, right? Maybe not, maybe I got it all wrong, I hope so!


http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... diaDrivers
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... iversR5F27

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PostPosted: Mon May 25, 2009 1:46 pm 
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Hmmm... I haven't made a diskless FE before. I thought a diskless FE was one that booted from flash memory? You're saying it's sharing the kernel from the MBE? If that is indeed true, you'll probably wanna wait for someone more knowledgeable than I to reply to this before doing something that will hose your setup.

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PostPosted: Mon May 25, 2009 5:24 pm 
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This is the diskless FE I was referring to, maybe I should have been clearer... http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... ssFrontend

Note that it shares /user from the MBE in a read-only fashion, for example, yet the nVidia installer needs to write to /lib. Normally any apps i need on the FE I would install on the MBE but as this is a graphics driver that won't work with my gfx card on the MBE, I am nervous. This is delving into an area of linux I know nothing about (which actually covers about 98% of linux :-) Any tips much appreciated....

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PostPosted: Mon May 25, 2009 5:40 pm 
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I see... this setup is over my head. My best advice is to clone your entire MBE HDD (either use gparted or clonezilla) to another one if you have a spare and try what you will. Otherwise, hold off and wait for someone else in here with a bigger knowledge base to reply.

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PostPosted: Mon May 25, 2009 5:44 pm 
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Reaching back into long ago memory about diskless workstations, a diskless client mounts it's root and other file systems from a master. In the simplest case (homogeneous machines, same versions and configurations) you could share all the non-writable parts of the image in place, but since all the client really knows is an initial boot image location (retrieved using tftp or the like) and config files, that remote location can be anywhere in the masters disk pool.

So the basic trick for heterogeneous machines is to setup different kernel images/configs and a separate virtual disk image for the client machines with different needs, and configure the boot server daemon (tftpd, ...) to provide the required image for each machine that contacts it.

In a simplified example lets say that you have 3 machines with 3 different architectures, A is the master disk server, B is the first client, and C is the second client. On A's disk there are 4 partitions, home shared by all the machines, A's own root, and roots for machines B and C.

Code:
+----------+
| / for A  |
+----------+
| / for B  |
+----------+
| / for C  |
+----------+
|  /home   |
+----------+

A would provide the appropriate kernel and configs to B and C when they started up and contact it's boot server process. B and C would download and run those images and remote mount the appropriate file systems. A real system would generally have a more complicated layout but this should give you the basic idea. There were also all sorts of clever tricks to reduce the amount of redundancy but that's less necessary than it used to be given KM's small installed size relative to modern disks.


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PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2009 5:25 pm 
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Thx for the replies and I'm sure tjc is on the right track but it's a little over my head I'm afraid. What I might do is use two different cards on the two different FEs, e.g. nVidia on one & ATI on the other, then I assume I could install both drivers on the MBE and reference the nVidia driver in the nVidia FE & ATI in the ATI FE. We'll see...

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