In our lab, we most often have to diagnose and fix video and graphics issues. By the way, if we can help as a testing environment, let us know. We push the technology pretty hard and have interest in making LTSP work better.
Can you explain how the division of video/graphics is handled? More specifically, what I wonder is whether the graphics/video division of labor is determined by (a) the ltsp software, (b) the operating system, (c) the program that is running or (d) something else or a combination of those. I am speaking of thin clients, here (not fat), and we have been using Ubuntu, but are considering other distros. I have gotten the impression that it all happens (or is supposed to happen) server-side and the video gets pushed out to the client. But, that is clearly not always the case, so I misunderstood or something. By the way I know very little about how graphics works, and even less about graphics in ltsp, but obviously I need to understand. For example, I just now posted a solution about xfig, where the program is running on the server, but the fonts must be installed in the client chroot. That isn't totally a video/graphics problem, but the rendered fonts are. Also, I made this post recently which is very much about graphics: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=30473657 I wonder if the problem there might somehow be analogous to the fonts issue, and how I might go about finding it. >From error messages we get, it sometimes seems that the programs (e.g. chimera or vmd in the post linked above) are attempting to access the local video card and/or OS directly. But, it seems they get confused, as if sometimes they see the server's card and drivers, and sometimes they see the client's. With the font issue, the xfig program is not installed in the client, but it requires the fonts to be in the client chroot, despite being run from the server, so some part of that program sees and queries the client OS. The following is of far less concern practically, but makes another good example: youtube and other web-based videos. Video transfers very badly to thin clients. Everything else about a machine might improve once it is a client as opposed to a separate machine, but the video often gets worse -- all choppy and hard to view, particularly if high resolution. If videos were the only thing, we could do without watching videos. But, we need good graphics for other reasons. By the way, hardware is not a limitation here. We're a computational chemistry lab, so we have GigE connections and hot-shot graphics cards with plenty of processor and ram on server and client, and we've tried permutations of drivers and such. We've even made sure the time between client and server is ntp-sync'd. Regarding the hardware, I've checked atop in the servers and clients, too, and they aren't being maxed out (ethernet, cpu, memory). I keep thinking there must be some configuration or installation issue that will solve this. I just don't know what. -- :-) Lachele Lachele Foley CCRC/UGA Athens, GA USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_feb _____________________________________________________________________ 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
