On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 12:52:39PM -0800, 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. > I just did some more testing. I had previously failed to successfully boot a P2 233 MHz machine, but it seemed my problems were video card related. I installed a pretty good video card -- lspci reports it as NV34GL Quadro FX 500/600 PCI (although it's AGP) -- and I can boot successfully.
The server is Debian Lenny with LTSP 5. I booted the P2 thin client with a gPXE cd. With 64 MB of RAM, the P2 thin client boots fine and I can run multiple tabs in Iceweasel and Epiphany. I was able to watch this video in Iceweasel and Epiphany, but the video was choppy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfI9e4BX0lU Note that I am not using Adobe's flash player, but the free one that came with my distro. I didn't notice much improvement by stepping up to 128 MB RAM, but I didn't test it extensively. I dropped it down to 32 MB RAM and tried it again. It booted! LDM took a long time to appear -- first the background and the text box, then the text graphics, then the "preferences" button. After logging in, it actually was pretty usable. I was able to play the above flash video in Epiphany. I opened Iceweasel, but it crashed the thin client. I had saved a session with 5 tabs open, and it was attempting to load those 5 tabs on startup. They were not multimedia -- just links from linuxtoday.com. What does it all mean? I'm not sure. I can say that changing the video card on this machine made a big improvement (it can now boot from LTSP 5 whereas before it could not). I've also seen a greater success rate using gPXE rather than Etherboot. I'm not sure why. -Rob ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
