Yikes.. So, originally I had the Sun Ray Server Software (SRSS) on one of my servers…Unfortunately for me it decided to cook the CPU, and there went that. So I moved it to Xen, and then to VMWare. Xen is nice but too much of a hassle to get working right, the performance is better then VMWare server, but one of the major benefits - any OS that’s Xen compatible for your “host” OS is negated by the fact that if you add anything that’s outside of a normal server piece of hardware, you jeopardize the stability of the system - ie my video capture card for HDTV, as well as my IDE controller were causing Xen to be unstable. So thats why I moved it to VMWare, which was fine except I started having some issues related to the clock. So I decided it was time to re-do my desktop.

I decided that I would take advantage of my CPU and make it 64-bit. What I did not realize was how much it was going to complicate the install of SRSS on my machine.

Here’s what you need to do:

Follow this guide:

http://wiki.sun-rays.org/index.php/Installing_Sun_Ray_Server_on_Debian

But all of the packages instead of just using “alien -d” to convert from RPM to Deb need to be unpackaged, the “Architecture” line changed from “i386” to “i386 amd64” and packaged back up.

Then you need to install libgdbm from the 32 bit distro into /usr/lib32. Finally, you need to install the PAM modules into /lib32/security. This gets you a working set up for the most part. My sound isn’t quite right, I don’t have the SUN variables on the Sun Rays, and session locking is broken.

Other then that, I have a faster desktop, and Sun Rays running off them. :-)