John, It's a very interesting comment that you are making about LTSP and the hardware that is required to use it.
In the beginning, LTSP was designed and intended for small machines. 10 years ago, there was tons of 133 and 166Mhz Pentiums with a whopping 32mb of ram. I made sure that it ran on those machines. I had to, because that's all we had. People were generally happy with it. As LTSP evolved, people started wanting more things from LTSP including support for local printers, usb sticks and audio. The goal I was reaching for was that thin client users should have the same desktop experience that other users get with a full Linux system on their desks. People expected to be able to plug in their USB Memory sticks and headsets and just magically have them work with desktop apps. At the same time, we wanted LTSP to be integrated into Distros like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, opensuse and others. A thin client requires many of the things that a full linux system needs, like a kernel, glibc, shells, the X Window system and more. The distro people didn't have the resources to support a whole new set of "Thin client specific" packages. Instead, they wanted to use the same desktop packages that they already had spent thousands of hours developing, testing, documenting and supporting. What we ended up with is a pretty complete Linux environment running on a thin client, net-booted from a Linux server. For the newer hardware out there, based on the Via and Atom chipsets, it's pretty good. users get nearly the same desktop experience that other users get. But, as you pointed out in your email, it leaves behind the older equipment that used to work pretty well with LTSP-4.2. This is a problem and unfortunately, I don't have a good solution for it. We just didn't (and still don't) have the man-hours to continue developing and supporting the old LTSP-4.x version and the LTSP-5 at the same time. All of the code is still available, if someone wanted to pickup the development of LTSP-4.x, but it's not exactly a trivial thing to do. It's in need of many upgrades, such as a newer kernel, newer Xorg, newer glibc and many other things. The build system took care of building the whole set of code, but the learning curve is pretty steep and it was very fussy about the host that you ran the build system on. I'm pretty sure lots of work would need to go into the build system to make it run on the latest distros. In the end, the best you could hope for is something that just runs on the low-end hardware. Keeping up with security updates, bug fixes, drivers for new hardware and general support would keep a team of people very busy. Jim McQuillan [email protected] john wrote: > Hi all, > > One of the reasons I originally found LTSP compelling was the modest > specs required of the thin clients. Lately I've been feeling like my > flavor of Linux/LTSP (ubuntu) has entered the same kind of systems > requirement arms-race that I thought I left behind when we moved away > from workstations running XP. > I used to be able to run PII's with 128 mb ram no problem. These days > 256 Mb on the client seems to be the minimum and 512 > is preferred. I still have lots of PII's lying around, and I suspect > vast portions of LTSP's potential user base may be working with older > technology as well. If the future of LTSP means you have to buy new > hardware to use it seems like a much less compelling solution. > > Perhaps my complaints are not really LTSP related (I have minimal > experience with other Distros with LTSP packages), and perhaps the > "fat client" approach is an attempt to get around this issue to some > degree. I am sure someone will set me straight if I > am conflating two different issues. :-) > > So is LTSP 4.2 the answer for older clients, or is there something > else to consider here? > > Thanks for letting me ruminate! > > John > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA > -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise > -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation > -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD > http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H > _____________________________________________________________________ > Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss > For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
