My experience with LTSP. First brief history. Several years ago, I started with LTSP 3.x as an experiment. Client was a Packard Bell Classic Pentium 75 with 16Mb RAM. To make client silent, un-plugged the CPU fan (in the case) and it lasted almost a year. (I think LTSP server was on Redhat 7.3, not sure.)
Moved to new house. Did not have time to set-up new LTSP lan. Did without for a few years. I work for a company that had some old hardware laying around. Last year, I set-up a LTSP environment using Edubuntu 7.04. Still had my old Linksys lan cards with bootrom. Was amazed that clients searched and found (on first try) the server and started. Server was a clone with AMD 3000plus CPU, 1Gb RAM, and a 20Gb hard drive. Two clients where some Compaq EP Deskpro with 433 celeron, 64Mb RAM, cdrom and floppy drive. Local devices worked with no mods to lts.conf. But, clients became slow (/tmp filling up and no compression.) Solved /tmp file problem. Waited (and lived with 7.04) knowing that newer version coming soon (only three months or so.) Due to Windows workstation upgrades (different story), acquired a second AMD 3000plus with 1.5Gb Ram and a 40Gb hard drive as server. Built a fresh install of Ubuntu 7.10. Added LTSP5 and clients would not boot. Could not even find the DHCP server. Discovered that there was no lts.conf file. anywhere. Built lts.conf file and clients started. Yah! Had the opportunity to buy three Dell GX50 celeron 700, 128Mb RAM for clients. The old Compaq EP always booted with a command line prompts. Newer Dell GX50 now boot with Ubuntu geographical boot screen (nice.) So much for history lesson, now a view of mine or two. LTSP5 running on Ubuntu 7.10 is much faster than Edubuntu 7.04. I feel this is largely due to file compression used in LTSP5 and Ubuntu 7.10. We now have three users that have access to internet (research) and company information, that could not have access previously. And instead of it costing $1000USD plus per workstation (three workstations, $3000USDplus) (for Windows based junk) we have about $250USD in the entire server/client LTSP5 system. And it works. Granted, I have instructed my user to NOT use any usb drive in clients right now as they cause Nautilus to leave processed running, but I have not had time to properly research why, yet. In the mean time, don't insert usb drives into clients and we will be okay. Point is that with out LTSP5 on going work, this would not be available to use. Yes, it has some bugs and problems, but we are getting along just fine with it and I have faith that these issues will be reduced in the near future. In my brief and limited experience, I have this to remind every LTSP user of. First eliminate any hardware issues you might have. These hardware issues can lead you to believe that you have software issues, when you may not. Changing clients (from Compaq to newer Dell units) changed the speed clients respond. That hardware change and use of compression (with Ubuntu 7.10) has given us a very nice system to use. (Fixing some of our internal lan issues helped alot, too.) Sorry about the length of my message, but with all the traffic on the discussion lists of late, I just thought that everyone needed a boost by reading about a good experience (not that previous "list" traffic has not been productive or necessarily negative.) Thank you Edubuntu/Ubuntu LTSP team for all your hard work. Oh, and Jim, thank you for LTSP, if it wasn't for that hospital (if I am remembering the original story correctly) we would not be "here" today. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php _____________________________________________________________________ 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
