On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 12:48:15PM -0500, Rob Owens wrote: <snip>
> ... On the other cards, I was given a terrible screen resolution (800x600 or > less on my 18" lcd). And this backs up my point, to a certain extent. When I started using LTSP back in late 1999, 800x600 was the "good" resolution, 640x480 was the "terrible one", and 1024x768 was the "OMG go out and buy a $500 video card and that super-special NEC Multisync monitor" "just out of your price range" one. So, the hardware that would have been considered "good" back then, is now considered "terrible", partly due to our own expectations, and partly due to the fact that it's getting darned near impossible to function on anything LESS than 1280x1024 since there's so much visual goo on the screen. The other point was brought up that X.org itself is fogetting it's "remote display" roots, and going for the bling. Certainly, us LTSP developers are pretty cognizant of the lower end boxes. Myself and Jim know a lot of people in Brazil who don't have access to anything else, vagrantc works with FreeGeek, and they have LOTS of older hardware, and Gadi makes a business out of selling nice, small little boxes. However, the people who make the bits we USE, like Xorg, the kernel, etc. aren't really thinking about us anymore. The rush to finally realize "the year of the linux desktop" and match Windows/Mac "bling for bling" is putting less of a premium on nice, small, and tight code, and more on getting super-sexy speedy features in quickly. That having been said, I still think LTSP's doing better than most. I'm sitting here on my 1ghz, 256 meg workstation, which, if it were running full Linux would be pokey or (heaven forfend) Vista, would be unusable, and as a thin client, it's fine. We might be able to come up with a scaled back kernel for each distro, and a "hand crafted" set of udev rules, but in the long run, it's a bit of a losing battle. And it's not like we haven't seen this before. The old 486 with 16 megs of ram didn't work with 4.2 either. And people complained about the bloat back then too :) Cheers, Scott -- Scott L. Balneaves | When one burns one's bridges, Systems Department | what a very nice fire it makes. Legal Aid Manitoba | -- Dylan Thomas ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
