[ale] LTSP

[William Fragakis]

On Wed, 2009-12-23 at 09:44 -0500, Joshua Kite wrote:
> The Windows laptop that my young boys have been using for the past
> year is finally giving up the ghost.  We gave it to them when we
> thought the hard drive was going to die, but it's somehow managed to
> creep along.  I have an opportunity to buy a very reasonably priced
> older Dell 650 workstation which would be more than sufficient for
> anything they would want to do.  My plan is to install Ubuntu since
> they like playing all of the games installed on my desktop.
> 
> I don't currently have a monitor lying around, and I'd rather avoid
> buying something else, if at all possible, so I was wondering if I
> could make the "new" workstation an LTSP server (probably using
> Edubuntu) and run the laptop as a client, possibly as a dual boot in
> the rare event that they needed to use something that wouldn't run on
> Wine.  My research has led to three questions which are probably
> obvious, but I may have to make a buy decision today, and I'm running
> out of Googlefu.
> 
> 1) Assuming a decent server and a hardwired network, how well would
> games play in such a setup?  Their favorite at the moment is Extreme
> Tux Racer.
Something like this tends not do well on LTSP. Graphic intensive stuff
like games and Flash pump an incredible amount of stuff down the
network. If the laptop could run those games before, though, you can run
the games locally, ie the client runs the game itself - see fat client
discussion below.
> 2) Are there any issues in using a laptop as a thin client?
Two issues mainly- one, it's nice if it's PXE bootable but not necessary
if you have another way of booting it (floppy, usb, cd). You can use
Etherboot to accomplish the same goal of network booting. PXE is just so
much easier since you don't need an external medium.
two, older laptops can have funky graphic cards which are hard for LTSP
in various flavors to detect. You might have to default to slow VESA
drivers or get your hands dirty editing lts.conf, the config file.
> 3) If I later wanted to put a monitor and keyboard on the workstation,
> could it continue to act as a LTSP server to the client while someone
> was using it as a desktop?
No problem at all. In my previous life, we would have teachers using the
server as their desktop and the kids running everything off her
computer.
> 
> If any of you have insight that you think would be useful for a
> moderately competent Linux user who has never worked with Terminal
> Servers, I would greatly appreciate it.
k12Linux has a live cd that you might find useful.

https://fedorahosted.org/k12linux/

check also the archives of the k12os mailing list and the ltsp mailing
list. You won't have a problem that likely hasn't been covered before.

If you need more of a "fat client" Edubuntu has a fat client option or
look at drbl.

http://drbl.sourceforge.net/

A fat client is more of a diskless workstation and runs programs on
itself rather than a thin client which runs everything off the server.

Lastly, any reason not to turn your Ubuntu desktop into their server?
Then put the money towards other fun stuff. You don't need a "server" to
run ltsp. Any modern dual core (not Atom, probably) will do fine. We
used to run an entire classroom of 20 desktops off of a single dual core
beige box. 


written on my MSI wind thin client running off an Athlon X2 server
downstairs running F11 k12linux,
William

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Josh Kite
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