Linux Terminal Server Project

[WMD]

http://www.ltsp.org

Anyone ever see this?  I've got it running here at school.  We set up a server with an Athlon XP 2000+ and 1GB RAM (probably the most powerful thing here..lol) and a bunch of P3/P2 clients.  The actual setup was pretty damn easy considering, except for a couple of simple user errors on my part. :o  With 100Mbps ethernet, even streaming video plays fine.  I did encounter a sluggishness problem with 3 users logged in, but that turned out to be because of the kernel not supporting 1GB RAM (it was stopping at around 380MB, even though it picked up 1GB).  Now everything is fast.  It's quite impressive.

[piratePenguin]

Yea, I've been looking at that a bit...

The way it works, it uses lots of bandwidth. Instead of "draw a button with label 'blah'" it communicates like "draw a grey rectangle, draw another stroked-black rectangle 2px outset, draw the text 'blah'" (for a simple button). Not brilliant. Themes are client-side. A server-side X toolkit extension that X clients use (perhaps through e.g. a GTK+ -> X extension wrapper-job) would solve this, and it's something I was thinking about doing at one stage not so long ago.

Still, it's very cool the way It Works. I wonder how much money could be saved, and how more-pleasant the computers in our school would be if we used this approach with GNU/Linux. A few very good servers can't cost much more than the new computers they bought in a few days ago with Windows XP (because Windows XP is the next big thing).

[Aloone_Jonez]

I don't understand the whole kernel not supporting 1GB of RAM though, how did you fix it?

I thought you could have upto 4GB with a 32-bit CPU I don't see how the kernel can effect this.

[WMD]

The Linux kernel only supports <1GB by default.  Apparently this saves kernel size, although by now it doesn't matter much.  There are 3 settings: <1GB, 4GB, and 64GB.  Simply installing a different kernel RPM (2.6.9-22.0ELhugemem) fixed this.  There are patches out there that change the starting limit to exactly 1GB so this issue doesn't occur, but I don't know of any distros that use it.

As for bandwidth usage...to me it didn't really seem that bad.  The only reason I'm using a 100Mbps switch is because I found that the 10Mbps hub we already had wouldn't allow for video playback.  Otherwise it's quite fine.  LTSP simply allows for a simple way to forward X over the network to thin clients - you'd have to rewrite much of X to get your idea working.

[piratePenguin]

As for bandwidth usage...to me it didn't really seem that bad.  The only reason I'm using a 100Mbps switch is because I found that the 10Mbps hub we already had wouldn't allow for video playback.  Otherwise it's quite fine.  LTSP simply allows for a simple way to forward X over the network to thin clients - you'd have to rewrite much of X to get your idea working.

Well, I'd be making an X extension. A toolkit, yea it'd be alot of work. If anything, I'd make a prototype kindof a thing - just a button. Wouldn't be fit to built a toolkit myself.

[WMD]

Bump.  Before Spring Break (I go back tomorrow), I installed a new release of the LTSP software.  Holy crap, did they improve stuff.  The local device stuff is much simpler (though I haven't gotten around to finishing it), and the clients boot up in about half the time.  They're using a 2.6 kernel and udev for that.

The saga continues....