[ale] SWAP over NFS

[Jim Kinney]

Good point. While the clients are beefy enough to run firefox, the overall
cpu is dog slow. So the "feel" at the client side is dragging. One of the
clients we use is a whopping 200MHz! With the app executing on the server
(twin dual-core Opteron 2GHz 16B RAM x4 Gig NICs) the only thing for the
client to do is spit pixels to the screen.

The firefox running local is a work around for the flash and streaming video
problem. The little clients (200MHz) can't do it. They will just bog down. A
stronger cpu (~ 500MHz min) does OK but you can't run EVERYTHING and have a
good user experience. XFCE is thin but KDE and GNOME are rich and that's
what is wanted.

I have a new fanless client I'm tinkering with (slowly - Google is eating
all my time right now) that has a video chip with hardware decoding of MPEG
2/4 and WMV. So the plan is to put firefox and either xine or mplayer local
with the video player modified to use the onboard hardware.

There are some things that are really nice in an all thin environment -
fl_TeacherTool being a big one. But it won't work right now with thick
client configurations. I'm looking into that as well but it's not a
tweak-n-go modification. It's a total rewrite so it won't happen anytime
soon :-(

I expect as the fanless clients get more powerful, the thick client approach
will take over. There is a lot of flexibility in that process that the thin
client set up lacks. A thick client can get a different root tree based on
it's MAC address and location listing. So room 123 gets app set A while room
234 gets set B and room 42 gets set A or B depending on the time of day.
That flexibility can be linked with, say OpenAdmin for knowledge of what the
current room use is and then deliver the teacher-defined configuration for
that class. That would be light years ahead of anything out there.

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 11:46 PM, Brian Pitts <brian at polibyte.com> wrote:

> Jim Kinney wrote:
> > There is some good movement on K12LTSP to have a series of apps run
> > local on the client (firefox with flash and streaming video is the main
> > drive) to offload the decompression to the client to stop bogging down
> > the server. A work party made it happen about 6 months ago but they have
> > not published what they did or how to replicate it.
>
> Maybe I'm missing something, but if your thin clients are powerful
> enough to run firefox and flash smoothly, why are they being used as
> thin clients? Wouldn't a setup like Chris is trying to accomplish (swap
> and root fs over the network, with the appropriate tmpfses so that
> multiple clients don't clobber /var/run etc) be just as easy to
> administer and require less beefy server hardware?
>
> -Brian
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
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