[ale] LTSP in Ubuntu

[Daniel Howard]

I just installed Ubuntu/LTSP on a classroom server, and overall it was a 
total pleasure.  Worked out of the box with two NIC server, was able to 
add all the educational titles with ease (couldn't add some in 
CentOS-K12LTSP, e.g.), applications that used to fail unless I launched 
them in a window (Childsplay, GCompris) worked flawlessly, and most 
importantly Flash sound worked automatically after installing the flash 
plugin; just had to go to a site with Flash, it pointed me to Flash 10 
for Linux, and sound on the client worked flawlessly.

One nag however: video is noticeably slower on the 128 MB HP thin 
clients with the Ubuntu based LTSP compared to the Fedora/Centos based 
LTSP, both Flash video like on YouTube/SesameStreet, as well as video 
for highly animated games like CircusLinux, e.g.

I tried switching the desktop to Xfce, that seemed to speed it up a 
little, but still noticeably slower than under Fedora/Centos.

I suspect this is just the Ubuntu folks being behind the curve on LTSP 
compared to the Fedora/Centos gang, but thought I'd offer the results 
here in case anyone knows of something I can try to speed up the 
performance.

Again, otherwise, it was a piece of cake to install and setup, and I'm 
very happy with the results, so I recommend it, especially for anyone 
that has older PCs to use as clients that might have a bit more RAM in 
them, which is what I suspect would really help here, but unfortunately 
not possible for the HP thin clients I have to work with.

Best,
Daniel

-- 
Daniel Howard
President and CEO
Georgia Open Source Education Foundation