SheepOS XFCE 64bit - Distro for the Render Farm Client

Overview

SheepOS is a very lightweight Distro based on Porteus / Slackware for the free and distributed render farm SheepIt.

Versions

This is the XFCE version, you can find the CLI version here.

Usage

• Download the ISO and extract it (e.g. with Ark or 7zip) to a FAT32 formatted USB drive.
• Boot from it
• enjoy xD

System requirements

• min. 2GB RAM, the more the better ;)

Building the ISO

Note: As far as I know, this method make's an image that only works for virtual machines.

1. Go the boot media.

2. Go to the porteus folder.

3. There should be a make_iso.sh file. Right click, then click, Open terminal here.

4. Type, sh make_iso.sh.

5. Type the location, the name, and extension of the image. Example: /dev/sdb/images/ImageName.iso

Make auto-login on start

This one is a bit more complicated, but doable. Also, watch out on the allowed maximum RAM usage.

1. Go the boot media.

2. Go to the porteus folder.

3. Go to the base.

4. Right click on the SheepIt module, and extract it.

5. Delete the .xzm module, so that we can free up a bit of space.

6. Change the settings, that you can see hidden files and folders, by pressing Ctrl + H

7. Go to the extracted module (sheepit-module-xfce), then home, and finally guest.

8. Open .sheepit.conf.

9. Edit the line number 2 from false to true.

10. Save and close the text editor.

11. Now, open SheepItClient.sh.

12. Edit the 4th line with your username and password/renderkey.

13. Save and close the text editor.

14. Head back to the base folder.

15. Right click on the SheepIt module folder, and then Create xzm module.

13.1. (Optional) Delete the module folder.

14. Reboot!

Adding own modules (e.g. nvidia-drivers)

//TODO

Notes

• This distro supports only CPU rendering for now.
• If you use the copy2RAM option, you can unplug the boot media after the distro had booted. But it comes at the price of highr RAM usage.

Issues/ToDo

[ ] Make that you simply need to burn the ISO, instead of extracting it.