LTSP-KERNEL(8)

📦
version 23.02 · 6 versions
, in debian trixie, ubuntu questing

💖 LTSP-KERNEL(8) 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to the LTSP Manual — this is the page for ltsp kernel, and it's literally the glow-up your TFTP boot folder has been waiting for 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

ltsp kernel — copy the kernel and initrd from an image to TFTP 💅

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

ltsp [ltsp-options] kernel [-k kernel-initrd] [image] ...

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so what this does is: it copies vmlinuz and initrd.img out of an image (or a chroot) and drops them into TFTP. That's it, that's the whole vibe ✨

If you don't name an image, it just processes all of them — no picking favourites, it does the whole roster 💖

For simplicity, only chroot directories and raw images are supported, and they've gotta be either full filesystems (squashfs, ext4) or full disks (flat VMs). They're allowed to be sparse, which is the space-preserving slay 🦋

🚩 bestie listen: don't use a separate /boot and don't use LVM in disk images. Just don't. It's giving chaos.

The targets will always be named vmlinuz and initrd.img, which keeps ltsp.ipxe simple — iconic behaviour honestly, we love a consistent naming convention 👑

💅 OPTIONS 💅

Head over to the ltsp(8) man page for ltsp-options, k?

  • -k, --kernel-initrd=glob-regex — tell it a kernel glob and an initrd regex so it can find them inside the image. If you leave it undefined it'll try to autodetect them for you 🧚. Peep the EXAMPLES section below for how this actually looks.

🌈 DIRECT IMAGES 🌈

okay this section is for the advanced LTSP sysadmins, the ones with main character energy 😭

Let's suppose you want to test whether your users would prefer Xubuntu over the Ubuntu MATE they're currently living in. First: move and rename your Xubuntu CD to this location — without using symlinks — and then update kernels and ipxe:

mv xubuntu-18.04-desktop-amd64.iso /srv/ltsp/images/xubuntu-18.04.img
ltsp kernel xubuntu-18.04
ltsp ipxe

If you reboot your clients, they'll now have the option to boot with the Xubuntu live CD in LTSP mode! 🔥 It's like booting with the live CD, except that all the users and their homes are available! So your users can normally login and work for days or weeks in the new environment, before you decide that yeah, they like Xubuntu, and you want to move from using the live CD to maintaining a Xubuntu image using a virtual machine. Growth 💖

You can also do this with virtual machine images! For example:

mv ~/VirtualBox\ VMs/debian/debian-flat.vmdk /srv/ltsp/images/debian-vm.img
ln -rs /srv/ltsp/images/debian-vm.img ~/VirtualBox\ VMs/debian/debian-flat.vmdk
ltsp kernel debian-vm
ltsp ipxe

These commands move your "debian" VM to the LTSP images directory, symlink it back to where VirtualBox expects it, and update the kernels and ipxe. After all that, you'll be able to boot directly from the "debian-vm" iPXE menu item without having to run ltsp image! It's the fastest way to test image changes without waiting 10 minutes for ltsp image every single time. no cap 🫶

Some advanced users may think of using the opposite symlink instead:

ln -rs ~/VirtualBox\ VMs/debian/debian-flat.vmdk /srv/ltsp/images/debian-vm.img
😭 Unfortunately NFS doesn't follow symlinks outside of the exported directories, so the clients wouldn't be able to boot in this case. Sad but true.

Advanced users may use bind mounts though, e.g.:

mount --bind ~/VirtualBox\ VMs/debian/debian-flat.vmdk /srv/ltsp/images/debian-vm.img

⭐ EXAMPLES ⭐

Typical use:

ltsp kernel x86_64

Passing a glob to locate the kernel and a regex to locate the initrd in a Debian live CD:

ltsp kernel --kernel-initrd="live/vmlinuz-* s|vmlinuz|initrd.img|"

Copyright 2019-2022 the LTSP team, see AUTHORS.

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

ltsp(8), ltsp.conf(5), ltsp-dnsmasq(8), ltsp-image(8), ltsp-info(8), ltsp-initrd(8), ltsp-ipxe(8), , ltsp-nfs(8), ltsp-remoteapps(8)

Online documentation is available on https://ltsp.org

and that's the whole page bestie 💖 this was LTSP 23.02-3, dated 2024-09-07 — go forth and populate your TFTP, you absolute icon ✨👑

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