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www.ltsp.org

45,000 saved harddisks ... wow

Rather than the problems of commodity purchasing and managing over 1,000 machines. Do the Linux Terminal Server Project approach. Short of full screen gaming, this stuff works really well for pooling up to 300 users onto a single Linux box. OK, 300 is a stretch, but 30 isn't, it's quite manageable. That lowers your management from 1000 to ~33 machines!

The point is that the management of an ltsp driven company is going to be much less than that of a workstation-by-workstation environment. And to top it off, the clients become something that will hardly ever need upgrades or patches. You will have to worry about hardware failures before you need to upgrade the CPU or RAM

You mean something like Linux Terminal Server Project ?

There's also the k-12 version out there too. While I think that is a good idea, you have to look at the security concerns of have that enabled by default. It's probably a good idea to have these shutoff and turn them on if you need them. It does run a few services to get it up and running (NFS, TFTP, DHCP). LSTP will run a script and set it all up for you if you can deal with the potential risks those services open up. It has packages for several distros.

I love the irony of people using those services to serve up Linux off a Windows box. If it is running terminal services then it could serve up your Outlook to your linux clients using rdesktop too. I don't think I go that route but options can get people moving towards migration when other ways can't. PHB's can make you do things you otherwise wouldn't.

I've administered Exchange boxes in the past and didn't like the babysitting but do see the need for it in a lot of businesses. It really is the biggest "killer app" Microsoft has for servers. There are a lot of ways to do the basics but nothing else comes close to the functionality of it yet. I looked at Openmail but the EOL on it killed it for the higher ups.

My Flash player works OK, except on remote X displays. It has been identified by the Mozilla guys as a bug in the plugin. There is a petition online over at the Linux Terminal Server Project page to try to convince Macromedia that enough people are affected to fix the issue.

It said "Linux-terminal" computer labs, so it sounds like everyone doesn't have a full blown computer. So hardware could be much less than $800. I think more details are needed on this.

Also check out this recent newsforge article on this same project.

The show will demonstrate how small-mid sized businesses can save money and take advantage of the latest technology showing off such goodies as Bayonne, LTSP, X Terminal services, OpenOffice.org, and Evolution

If you are interested in what GNU/Linux solutions are out there for your small to mid sized office, come over to Segal Theater at CUNY Graduate Center, 34th St. and 5th Ave from 10am-5pm next Friday the 24th. [Free and Open to the Public]

This is a volunteer demonstration. With work like this, we are changing the face of New York. If you are interested in coming or helping, contact paulr at nylxs.com.

You want lower cost-per-seat and easier maintenence overall? Spend half that money on a powerful server, and convert the desktop machines for use as thin clients. No more tweaking settings on each system! No more cleaning up after settings screwed up by users on each system!

I'm surprised not to see more references to the stories about other organizations doing this, such as:

Binson's Hospital Supplies

Newspaper Association of America

(vendor) Integrity Networking Systems

City of Largo

Home Depot

. . .

And if you'd like to really cut down on MS licenses, don't forget about Crossover Office.

ltsp.org
k12 ltsp

the k12 set up has a really easy install, complete with redhat 7.2

check out qvwm (windows style window manager) and codeweavers (Realplayer, Quicktime, etc. plugins for linux browsers)

It may be hard to get all the windows games you want but there are some that ive seen work. Go to linuxGames.com for info on setting up games with linux. I know they have a tutorial for getting Starvraft working with wine.

So I suggest we all start donating one of our old 486's together with a NIC with BootROM. Since fast internet access is obviously not a problem, you can set up one giant LTSP terminal server and use cheap workstations as 'things'. All in favor?

But really, how much of the CPU time on your desktop do you use at any given time? Computing power has advanced dramatically since the days of the mainframe, and right now, most of the clock cycles are wasted on your average desktop. You no longer need the full computing power of one computer for one desktop user with basic needs. (Games, development, etc, are another story.) It's a lot more cost efficient to use 50% of one CPU than 5% of 10 CPUs. That's why projects like these are beginning to make sense once again.

They made sense long ago, when everything was CLI, and you didn't need all that much processing power to check your e-mail, so sharing CPU time was feasible. Now, many people use GUIs, so why not use all the proccessor time you're wasting with your Athlon 2GHz with a gig of RAM? I've said it before... but this is the reason why projects like the Linux Terminal Server Project exist.

Sounds like those old 486's would make decent terminals for a linux terminal server (LTSP). Just put one big badass server on the lab, install LTSP, and presto - every 486 has a login manager screen, users log in and apps get run on the server, displayed on each workstation - works like a charm.

I can tell you demoing LTSP has never failed to leave people drooling, and while the server should be a big machine (by Linux standards, you probably DON'T need 16 GB RAM, 8 processors and 1 TB of disk space), the clients themselves can be as lowly as necessary (as long as they can boot a Linux kernel, have a compatible graphics card, NIC and mouse, you're all set).

I talked to some of these folks at LinuxWorld Expo, and it looked like they had things working. Somebody was even selling NICs and boot PROMs. They would be the logical starting point.

Unfortunately, I don't have my bag 'o swag with me here at work, or I might even be able to find the docs.

Also look at the Linux Journal article on LinuxBIOS

http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4888


http://ltsp.org Linux Terminal Server Project who were using NetBoot, if I remember correctly.


http://sourceforge.net/projects/netboot/

and not sure if you got the netboot howto

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/DisklessHOWTO.html
(netboot is linux based, etherboot is bsd based)

PXE works quite well, check out the LTSP project and the K12LTSP project for examples of working PXE solutions. I use the K12LTSP distribution to run a lab of Linux diskless terminals in my public school district and they work quite well. I turn them on, and they go.

The Linux Terminal Server Project is exactly what you're talking about. I've been using it at home here to play around with for a few months now. It's really slick. I have a bunch of my old computers that would otherwise be in the dumpster that are right now serving as terminals. And they're pretty fast, since all the apps run on my big Athlon box.

It works by netbooting from your server. Some kind of bootrom code, either on your network card or on a floppy disk, initalizes the network card. It uses DHCP to find its own IP address, and then it uses TFTP to download a small Linux kernel over the network. This loads up and uses an NFS-mounted root to run an X server on the local computer. The X server connects back to the main server by XDMCP, and you get your XDM/GDM/KDM login window.

The LTSP guys have done a great job packaging this all up. Take a look. And as for your requirement of running it on a Windows box, see Cygwin's XFree86 port to Windows. You can use it to connect with XDMCP. Of course, I don't know why you wouldn't just pop in a bootdisk...

The biggest drawback to this approach is remote access security. Look at that paragraph and how many daemons and services you need to have running. But I imagine that if it was secured well enough, it'd be fine. Actually, there is a way to make this all go over VNC (or VNC with compression). It's not as fast, but at least that's only one TCP port and a lot easier to get by firewalls.

There's a great bunch of guys working on this project. And its nice to be able to connect to #ltsp on irc.openprojects.net and get the lead developers to answer your questions.

Michael F. Robbins

I used to think that there would be some things lost from moving to an all linux desktop machine such as the ability to terminal server over to a 2000 TS. Well this is no longer the case. I found a small 50K program called rdesktop that allows any linux machine to make Terminal Server connections to Windows servers. This software comes installed by default in the K12LTSP linux distribution. A direct link here.

From inside a windows os there are also a number of ways to connect to linux hosts. You can use a windows compatible X client such as X-Win to connect to a server with Linux Terminal Server Project software installed. Using X gives you the ability to pipe information through an encrypted connection you can setup with ssh/openssh.

I find it hard to believe that so many people have made suggestions involving Windows and so few of these people seem to grasp the concept of an X-terminal or VNC or LTSP. Unix has been doing this with console and X-Windows for probably over 15 years now, come on, get a clue people! I personally use I-openers running off an LTSP server, and Another friend uses old 486 boxen as clients to an LTSP server. X-terminals work beautifully as well and can be had off ebay for $20. Honestly, paying for Windows Terminal Server?

I think they can run on 200Mhz forever if they run a Linux Terminal Server.

I had her trying out a LTSP terminal to convince her that she doesn't need a hd at all. I can make this work if I can find a IM client that supports all of MSN Messenger's smileys. I get to deal with end-users at home too. :P

No more new IBM drives for me until I see better drives.

1. Check to see how many nodes there are.
2. See how many cpus are in each node.
3. Calculate the total number of CPUs.
4. fork off a povray process for each CPU.
5. Wait for a process to end and fork off a new one if necessary.
6. take the individual files and make an avi file
7. encode the avi file to your favorite compression standard.
8. all done.

So, if I'm reading this right, it will run Windows CE, and allow you to do remote desktop stuff with a Windows XP machine via Windows Terminal Server. That sounds really nifty, except I don't want to run Windows XP, ever.
Perhaps it could also net-boot and run Linux Terminal Server, instead. Are there any good X Servers for Windows CE? Any GPL'd? I think there is a GPL'd Java one that might run on Windows CE.
I know that VNC runs on Windows CE. While VNC is very slow when connecting to a Windows machine, it is quite fast connecting to a Linux machine. From what I understand, it isn't as fast as Cygwin/Xfree ,but the install is sooooooooooo much easier.

It doesn't seem to be a new concept at all.

Users don't want to have to deal with hardware issues, they want their computer to work like their phone. Plug it in, and it works - it just works.

Perhaps what Alan was unconsciously advocating was the promotion of terminal services like those being developed by LTSP [...]

People are usually amazed when I show them this movie, especially when I say that, yes, you don't have to install any software, you just build it and plug it to the working network. People are used to situation where when you want to add 20 new computers to your office, it's a work for few days, not to mention licensing for the software plus the price of the hardware.

I use this movie in my LTSP propaganda.

I think we are going to see a shift in thought about what computers are, and what they can do for us. As Alan stated, users want services, if their computer messes up, they want to hit the power button, and have it all come back like it was. Users don't want to have to deal with hardware issues, they want their computer to work like their phone. Plug it in, and it works - it just works.

Perhaps what Alan was unconsciously advocating was the promotion of terminal services like those being developed by LTSP and perhaps companies offering terminal/computer services to employees, and perhaps in a broader sense, 'computer utilities' who would offer computer service to residential and small business customers.

Compared to Microsoft, which requires 3 (count them, 3) licences for one user on one thin client to connect to one terminal server (one for the terminal server OS, one for the client OS, and one for the Client Access Licence), Linux can provide better functionality at a fraction of the cost. Linux opens this market, where Microsoft has sufficiently stifled its growth by making it more difficult than it should be to enter that market.

At the local college here, we have 8 Citrix ICA servers (nice, dual proc 1ghz xeon, tons ram) running NT4.0 terminal server. Its a nice fit for the students/fac, and the NT shop that is ran here (we're working on changing it). We were buying a few of these WYSE winterms to deploy across campus to allow access, but at over $800 a pop those things get expensive in a hurry.

So, in order to save money and provide loads more functionality, we bought a thinknic and i went about the process of hacking the hell out if it. there are tons of websites (hack-a-nic.com, and yahoo's groups are just 2) that describe the in's and out's of this $199 piece of hardware.

all in all, they are pretty easy to hack. the standard OS is based of debian i believe, and runs 2.2.x (i forget). anyway, the window manager is blackbox and you can change the menus a bit to add right-click desktop functionality and turn off the always-on netscape session. I have ours with a custom background, and updated version of citrix, mozilla instead of netscape, and links to a telnet client and ssh. i also have one that i am testing that uses a PAM module to authenticate off of the NT domain so the user can open and run a couple of native apps like abiword and gnumeric and save their work to their NT network drive.

We now have about 25 of these things scattered across campus, and they work great. you could also use them to connect to a linux terminal server instead of windows. Next up for us is providing full X-terminal functionality to a couple of linux servers to provide remote application support. these are really nifty boxes.

First off, a school facing budget cuts should not be relying on Windows. That's a 'solution' which will only get more expensive over time.

That being said, I would recommend Linux or one of the free BSD variants, as they have the capability to be thin clients (NFS mount filesystems). If you're interested in doing this with Linux, there's already a project set up to do just that: Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP).

I was nearly hired by a university myself, and had suggested they look into this, as it also makes life easier when trying to administrate such a large number of systems. Alas, the university rejected both the suggestion, and my bid for employment - but that's another story. :)

Good luck.

K12linux.org is a great site for info and their Red Hat Distro. I have meet Eric and Paul a few times, really great people. They have developed quite a following because they are making implimenting a thin client setup really easy.

K12ltsp is based on www.ltsp.org which is in version 3.0 right now. I use this software to set up computer labs in non-profits in and around Portland. We are a NP ourselves) It is gaining maturity, system administration is barely more work than working on a box running programs locally. You need to have DHCP running on the server, TFTP setup, and allow it to serve applications to remote X-Clients, and that is about it.

Here are some links for further reading on what others have done.
umn
olinux
solucorp
askslashdot
gbdirect
tucows
XDM

There is two options that are cost effective

1. Linux Terminal Server Project. This will serve linux desktops over a thin client solution. LTSP.org

2. Linux Terminal Server pushing to Windows ?? Terminal Services. The program that does the magic is RDesktop. It is a UNIX implimentation of the RDP protocol used by Windows. There is a guy doing this in a project located at Wilisystem. It basically uses LTSP to boot the clients and passes the rest off to Window$. You still need client access licenses for Windows in this scenario.

As far as cost effective, nothing could be more cost effective. Think about it, do you want to admin 500 PC's or a few servers and 500 terminals. When a terminal has a hardware failure you throw it away since the box itself only costs about 300 bucks as opposed to 800 to 1000 for a useable PC workstation with disks. We do this terminal stuff all the time at my work.

There is two options that are cost effective

1. Linux Terminal Server Project. This will serve linux desktops over a thin client solution. LTSP.org

2. Linux Terminal Server pushing to Windows ?? Terminal Services. The program that does the magic is RDesktop. It is a UNIX implimentation of the RDP protocol used by Windows. There is a guy doing this in a project located at Wilisystem. It basically uses LTSP to boot the clients and passes the rest off to Window$. You still need client access licenses for Windows in this scenario.

As far as cost effective, nothing could be more cost effective. Think about it, do you want to admin 500 PC's or a few servers and 500 terminals. When a terminal has a hardware failure you throw it away since the box itself only costs about 300 bucks as opposed to 800 to 1000 for a useable PC workstation with disks. We do this terminal stuff all the time at my work.

Everybody is already refering to the Linux TS project, but here is a related project: a HOWTO for diskless Windows Terminal Server thin clients, based on Linux. It may be a lot of work, but it seems to me that once you have gone through the trouble, rolling out new terminals will be a breeze.

LTSP seems to work nicely from what I've seen, though I don't run a lab, I just played about with it. Seems good though, even supports Debian, Xf86v4 and Linux 2.4.x. The current thin-client poster child of Linux seems to be the City of Largo ... google around for that a bit, but that story basically details some stuff about their implementation. Hope that helped.

I have installed LTSP and it works like a charm. No client maintenance issues. Can be booted from the NIC. And best of all it's FREE.

Just for my workaday Linux distro, Red Hat 7.1. I for the life of me cannot understand why in heaven's name I need to install Kerberos to install the RPM package for CVS or LPRng. (...) The list of odd dependencies can go on and on ad nauseam, and there are many other signs of bloat. It's this kind of bloat that makes it impossible to run an up to date Linux distro on older hardware.

The NIC, which AC told me about, is currently the best box of this kind to my knowledge. I would prefer, however, if it had no CD/modem/flashdisk and was cheaper without any stuff I don't need. I would love to see a box which is able to act as an X terminal, booting from network, without any moving parts, for something like $100. If the NIC cos ts $200 with all of the features, it would be possible to build a stripped version for $100.

I generally nead exactly TCSX-1, but four times cheaper... If only there was a TCSX-1 priced as optimally as the NIC, it would cost below $100... Oh, well... I'll try to find out where and for how much I can buy parts which they use. If anyone has any experience with buying and using such integrated board, similar to this board (I don't know what exactly it is, they only say in the spec what it has, not what model it is), please let me know. Thanks.

Another related topics,
What are the cheapest stand-alone:

• x86 processors (50+ MHz)
• mainboards
• ethernet adapters (100 Mb/s)
• VGAs (1+ MB)
• sound cards

It's very hard to find a low-end PC parts today, they don't sell processors with clock rates not measured in GHz in computer stores, you know...

After a quick Google search, I see there are lots of different single board PCs. I'll try to read about them and post the most interesting suff. If you know any of these boards, especially if you have used one of them with Linux Terminal Server or something similar (generally the most important is if you can run Linux on them without any problems) then please post it here. Btw, are there any cases available for them?

For you Mandrake users, I head a project to include LTSP and Mosix on a Mandrake configured kernel; to package and explain in very easy terms the whole process, and then eventually release a stripped-down Mdk, geared towards education (edu-tech is pretty much my field) ala K12 LTSP. We call it The Mandrake Mosix Terminal Server Project. Check it out and lend a hand if interested. Thanks.

Why Windows does not run off a ramdrive

AFAIK Linux and Open BSD cannot do this either.

Alan praises Mosix a bit in this interview. A bunch of us from irc.openprojects.net are working on a project to package full install/configuration scripts first for Mandrake users, then for everyone. Come check us out at The Mandrake Mosix Terminal Server Project, as you probably guessed, we're also working on packaging LTSP+Mosix script for LTSP 3.0 with the author of the original ltsp_mosix howto.

This interview is part of an ongoing series. Join our announce-only mailing list to receive a brief email when interviews are posted to Kerneltrap.

Jeremy Andrews: A quick Google search reveals that you've already been involved in quite a few interviews. However, for the readers out there who are not familiar with you and your contributions to Linux, can you tell a little about yourself?

Alan Cox: Pretty generic on the whole - born (that bit is required anyway), school, chickenpox, German measles, mumps, lessons and somewhere down the line computers thanks to a couple of teachers interested in computing who gave up their own lunchtimes one evening a week to teach pupils who were interested. At the time the school had 3 computers and you'd get maybe 15 or 20 minute sessions, but that was way more than most. Somehow computing just soaked in, so by the time I officially did computing at school I was the owner of a ZX81 (first real mass market cheap UK computer) and already teaching the teachers.

I did the end of school exam ('O' level to UK people) in 30 minutes for a 3 hour paper and by the time I was at college (16-18) I was convinced of my own brilliance.

At the end of college before going to university I worked briefly in the game world, helping do ports of the Scott Adams games to UK machines and bits of some other games, then my own game. That taught me a certain amount about the computing and real world. The computer game business at the time was run by the people who failed to get into the music industry because they'd have to think a moment before selling their grandmother. It was also full of people who were all as good at computing and many of them rather better than I was. Worse yet, every one of them was either as convinced of their own brilliance as me, mentally unstable, or both.

Like the music industry nobody in the computer game industry made any money but mysteriously all the game company owners drove expensive cars and lived in huge houses.

University was a slightly checkered career, not on the whole due to taking other people's computers apart but because of the rather odd rules at Aberystwyth. I learned a lot there (more from my own experiments and trying to achieve things than from the course), but because of the other courses you had to pass (Physics in my case) ended up changing university to one that didn't require I could do physics but required I could do computer science.

Looking back on university I'm very glad I did it. At the time I thought management skills, software engineering, databases and even bits of maths like proof by induction were completely irrelevant. I've used all of them in my Linux work.

The whole Linux thing was really an accident - my interest was text based adventure games (the world of Colossal cave etc) and also multi user games based on that style (Essex MUD1 and so on). I got into Linux looking for a better platform to developer AberMUD on.

I ended up doing time synchronization across ethernet, a large C++ network file/project manager, and then ISDN code for Sonix and later 3COM. I then escaped to be a sysadmin at NTL, left to work at a small saner ISP (Cymru.Net) which NTL bought. At that point I escaped to Red Hat and Linux became a job.

That wasn't actually an easy decision. It probably has many people thinking "So why didn't he go to Red Hat earlier, surely they would have taken him on". I probably should have, but to turn a hobby into work always risks losing the fun factor. It was actually something I had to give a lot of thought. When it came down to working on Linux or working for a telco again however that made the decision easy.

JA: How long have you worked for Red Hat? Can you offer any reflections on them, as a company? As a distribution?

Alan Cox: I joined Red Hat properly Jan 1 2000, that was the point at which there was a Red Hat in Europe and we'd sorted all the paperwork out. It suits me well as it's very much an open source company, and has a management that believes in both open source and running a company well to make a profit. Not that we get everything right, but we try.

As a distribution I run it on most my boxes. The software I always change is the usual "religious warfare" stuff - removing sendmail for exim for example.

JA: You mentioned earlier a game that you wrote. What was the game called? Is it still available anywhere?

Alan Cox: It was called Blizzard Pass. The ZX spectrum 128 version of it was released with a Spectrum 128K launch pack, then by Tynesoft as part of a two game pair. The rights to the Spectrum 128K version and the game interpreter it uses are still owned by Adventuresoft UK and/or Tynesoft somewhere.

JA: Do you still play any text based games? Or other games?

Alan Cox: Single player ones yes and there are people turning out games in the yearly IF competition that are the equal of Infocom. I actually find most of the multiplayer ones extremely boring, and the quality and gameplay has not improved that I've seen in the past ten years.

MUD1, MIST, AberMUD and the like were originally designed to be very competitive games. The game play was designed so that you had to be able to figure game strategy very fast, and included large amounts of player versus player violence.

JA: Many were surprised (and disappointed) when you announced that you were not interested in maintaining the 2.4 kernel tree. What caused you to make this decision?

Alan Cox: A variety of things were involved in that decision. In part I want to work on other projects and ideas. I've already been using some of the time freed up to rewrite the aacraid driver and to clean up some of the very old and grungy SCSI drivers instead.

It's also good that a system doesn't settle down with a sort of elite who created it and that new ideas and younger people are always stepping into the project. I want to be sure that when I'm an old fart there are plenty of people in the community with both the knowledge and the standing to call me an idiot when I say something stupid, rather than treat my words as gospel.

Some of the attitudes people had after the decision were annoying. The vision most people have of Brazil is bizarre. Its not the third world that people seem to think. Yes it has its problems, but it is one of the ten largest economies in the world, and overall it has lower crime rates than the UK or USA. Its a source of huge amounts of innovation and many great projects - including things like Window Maker, and apt for RPM.

JA: Speaking of Window Maker, what desktop environment do you use?

Alan Cox: That varies. Of choice I generally run xfce but I am frequently running the Gnome + nautilus set up and occasionally KDE because plenty of time is spent beta testing new releases. The only good way to beta test a new release is to run it.

JA: Marcelo Tosatti is now maintaining the 2.4 tree. You even suggested him yourself. Why did you recommend him, above others? How do you feel he's doing so far?

Alan Cox: I sort of shadowed Marcelo the first release without telling him. His 2.4.17 looked a lot like my collection. The differences were minor and quite reasonable. I'm extremely happy with the way Marcelo is turning out kernels and also dealing with people. He got a lot of people trying to push him around at the start, and a deluge of journalists but has survived very well.

JA: The "stable" 2.4 series has had a bumpy ride, most noticeably with a complete change in the VM. How stable do you feel the current 2.4.17 release is, in comparison with the 2.2 series? Are there reasons why people may still not want to upgrade business critical servers?

Alan Cox: A prior major release is always going to be much much more stable. Many people run the 2.2 tree on critical systems because it does what they need and it has stayed up for years. There is no deliberate vendor enforced upgrade system in the free software world so people can choose older code. It's a good idea for many projects.

2.4.9-ac and 2.4.9-RH (the Red Hat errata kernel) I was pretty happy with. The 2.4.17 tree is getting there, with Ben's recent fixups and a bit more tuning I think it will turn out nicely. I'm never truly happy until the box stays up for so long that I only reboot to do a major upgrade.

JA: Where do you think this tuning most needs to occur?

Alan Cox: Thats always the problem. When you know what needs tuning the job is almost done. The lower disk throughput seems to be caused by the VM layer but at the moment I don't know for sure it isn't some of the disk scheduling changes.

JA: Linus agreed that the major changes he made to the VM in a "stable" kernel tree were ill-timed, however claiming, "I think that Alan will see the light eventually." Are you happy with the new VM?

Alan Cox: Not really. I'm seeing 20% slower performance on a lot of real world workloads and while that is likely to be a bit of tuning it should have happened in 2.5. I don't think the Andrea VM is technically superior and that the scale of change was right. Once Linus had done it however there was no point going backward. By 2.4.15/6 various bits from Rik and Marcelo and others had the tree in a state where everyone agreed that it was better to start future VM work from that point. Rik is doing a revere map based VM now which is interesting and Andrea is tuning the VM stuff he did for 2.4.

JA: You still maintain the stable 2.2 kernel, the most recent release in that series being 2.2.20. In the changelog building up to this release was a controversial tag, "Security fixes. Details censored in accordance with the US DMCA". What prompted you to censor these fixes? Was it intended as a political statement, or done out of fear of possible prosecution?

Alan Cox: It was simply a matter of following the law and avoiding liability. The fact that American citizens are forbidden by their own government from hearing, or speaking the truth turns itself into a political statement.

It's an unfortunate situation when the major Linux conference pretty much has to be in Canada because the US will not let some of the attendees even pass through their airspace, and many of the others fear to visit. I just hope that over time things will improve.

At the moment the US, UK and much of the EEC slide slowly toward a police state. Innovation is hard, and innovators are generally buried in courts by established interests. I don't want to become a citizen of the new soviet union, forbidden from watching DVD's from the outside world, from burning flags in protest, and risking jail for offending a large company. People have to get involved in fighting such things. If they do not fight, they may well be swimming to Cuba, or serving in restaurants in Mexico City while trying to avoid deportation within thirty years.

I'm working with FIPR (the foundation for information policy research) to do my bit. It's up to everyone else to do their bits too.

JA: You mention the UK moving toward a police state, as well as the US. Has the UK passed similar laws to the US DMCA, or the proposed SSSCA?

Alan Cox: The UK already has certain anti-convention laws, and the EU is implementing a common set at the moment. In some ways it is a lot saner than the DMCA (eg its a lot more explicit about reverse engineering for compatibility) and it doesn't seek to censor people in quite the same way. Nevertheless it has many of the same effects as the DMCA such as getting people arrested for helping the disabled read e-books.

Could Sklyarov have happened in the UK. I think the answer is yes but as a civil case. Regardless of what the law says large companies can always play the system against the little guy.

JA: Since the events that occurred on September 11'th, here in the US it has been increasingly difficult to reason with people about the need to preserve our freedom and privacy. Since that time, there's been a fury of attempted legislation that seems to, as you say, move us toward a police state. Can you offer any ideas for ways we, ordinary people, can help prevent this from happening?

Alan Cox: Keep reminding people they live in a police state ?

"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."

On the whole for the US, I'm not the one to answer that. It is a different system and society. We have real trouble even telling the two US parties apart.

JA: Back to Linux, at what point, if any, will you stop maintaining the 2.2 kernel?

Alan Cox: I guess when nobody is using it. It takes a lot less effort to just keep a very stable tree ticking along. There are still people intentionally shipping 2.0 based products even today.

JA: Do you foresee maintaining a stable 2.6-ac branch, when the 2.6 stable tree is started?

Alan Cox: I haven't thought that far ahead.

JA: Does 2.5 development get much of your focus?

Alan Cox: Right now basically none. I was pondering collecting together driver and other stuff to feed on to Linus as he worked on the bio but Dave Jones has already started doing a good job on that.

JA: A lot of kernel hackers greatly admire you and your Linux efforts. You certainly have an amazing ability to organize and create stable kernels. For example, during the unstable period of 2.4, your -ac series proved to be quite solid on all my servers, as reported by many. In regards to your own accomplishments, what do you most take pride in?

Alan Cox: The 2.4-ac tree turned out very well. It was never something I set out to make a big thing but it ended up being used as the base for most 2.4 vendor released kernels. That was a big thing, not just for the code quality, but also because it showed everyone is still working together. 2.4-ac was built out of patches from many places, and I think almost every vendor, put together by someone at Red Hat and in various variant forms shipped by many other companies.

Probably the greatest thing has been seeing all that Linux has made possible around the world, many of which with proprietary licenses charged in US currency simply could not have happened. Being able to say "have a copy, have as many copies as you want, make changes, localize it, build an entire local computing industry" to anyone in the developing world is something very special. Even in the developed world its created so many great things, like the LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) putting Linux in schools that simply could not have afforded to do it any other way.

I always like to say "_Em_powered by Linux".

JA: You released 2.4.18pre3-ac1 last Sunday (1/13), the first since 2.4.13-ac8 in early November. What prompted this release? Do you intend to actively release the -ac kernel patches again?

Alan Cox: People kept bugging me. It's a mix of the stuff I actually run here and a trawl of the stuff that I had piled up during the change over - I found a lot more than I expected that was in my pile that was before Marcelo took over and escaped merging. Most of it is stuff I need to send on - so its not like the huge -ac patches of old, just some handy bits.

I'll probably stick out an ac2 soon as well.

JA: The 2.2 tree is quite solid, and hence few changes are made. Your -ac series is no longer the huge patch "of old". What do you do with all this reclaimed time?

Alan Cox: Sleep.

Some of it is being spent doing drivers, other bits working on new things and some is beginning to get spent on projects big Red Hat customers need and which will benefit Linux as a whole.

JA: Do you use Linux exclusively, or do you use other operating systems as well?

Alan Cox: I run Linux on pretty much everything except the microwave and washing machine. Those are tempting targets but would probably make Telsa extremely cross.

JA: Do you have any predictions as to the future of Linux?

Alan Cox: For the next five years I guess (and its definitely a guess)

• Linux in TV sets/set top boxes becoming much more common
• More consolidation
• A lot of work on clustering and fault tolerant Linux
• Limited desktop penetration, at least until some lawmaker or civil litigants have the guts to get a just settlement out of Microsoft.
• People figuring out which software models work best and where
• Vastly more software development moving from the EU and USA to Eastern Europe, Brazil and the like, both in Linux companies and outside.
• Just possibly IBM becoming a Linux vendor proper perhaps by buying out the rest of SuSE.
• Possibly Linus becoming directly paid to work on Linux, perhaps via OSDL or a standards group so he isn't "owned" by a vendor - should transmeta die.

(I figure lots of predictions is best. People will forget the ones I get wrong and marvel over the rest)

JA: Do you consider Linus a friend?

Alan Cox: Business associate perhaps. We are very different people. Linus is terribly reserved, quiet and neat. I'm none of those and don't intend to be. Live fast, die old, and make very sure everyone knows you were there.

JA: What do you enjoy doing in your non-Linux time?

Alan Cox: New things. Cooking is fun, gardening has been less of a success, although I do enjoy grinning manically at passing people while waving an axe around attempting to kill off unwanted plant life.

JA: That's a humorous image, you waving an axe and grinning manically. What have you been trying to grow?

Alan Cox: Actually it's mostly been trying to stop things growing and pruning them. In particular a small tree that was too close to the house and which refuses to actually die off when it is chopped down. The plants I have at the moment are growing quite well enough without assistance.

JA: As for cooking, what types of food do you like to prepare?

Alan Cox: Mostly Chinese style stuff. Actually I guess the right phrase is "British Chinese restaurant style food". Telsa is actually the better cook although she will never admit it.

JA: How did you meet Telsa?

Alan Cox: She lived in the same house in Aberystwyth as an old friend, so we first met that way. Lucky co-incidences.

JA: Have you and Telsa played the 'U.S, Patent Number 1' board game she bought you for Christmas yet?

Alan Cox: Not yet. Building a time machine (the goal of the game) would be useful but I'd personally not use it to get patent #1 but to take the proposers of the patent system forward to today so they can go back home and figure out how to invent it in a way big business cannot corrupt and abuse.

JA: Do you have any advice to offer people just getting started with kernel hacking?

Alan Cox: Ignore everyone who tells you kernel hacking is hard, special or different. It's a large program, and bug fixing or driver tweaking can be a best starting point. It is however not magic, nor written in a secret language that only deep initiates with beards can read.

Play with it, try things, break it horribly and enjoy yourself. I started on the networking code because it didn't work very well. Everything I knew about TCP/IP I had downloaded the same day I started hacking the net code. My first attempts were not pretty but it was *fun*.

JA: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Alan Cox: Another zero to the end of the average Linux uptime, Ralph Nader to the list of US presidents and some semblance of real democracy to UK and EU government.

JA: Thank you very much for the time you've put into this interview, and much more for all the amazing effort you've put into Linux. You have done a lot to help bring us where we are.

According to this HowTo, you can have the ThinkNIC boot directly from the net without making or using a CDROM.

• Shuttle FV24 motherboard Flex ATX form factor, sound, video, network built on.
  
• VIA C3 processors. Not as fast as some other processors, but you can use a passive heatsink instead of needing a CPU fan to cool it down ( less moving parts to break, and less noise).
  
• Alpha U60-V25C passive heatsink.
  
• Disk on module. I couldn't get the Shuttle machines to netbook from their build-in ethernet, so I added a disk on module to store the boot code (for Etherboot). The disk on modules plug directly into the IDE slot on the motherboard and are recognized as IDE drives.
  
• A small case. I cant find the one I used, but there are several Micro-ATX or Flex-ATX cases out there.
  

• Shuttle FV24 motherboard Flex ATX form factor, sound, video, network built on.
  
• VIA C3 processors. Not as fast as some other processors, but you can use a passive heatsink instead of needing a CPU fan to cool it down ( less moving parts to break, and less noise).
  
• Alpha U60-V25C passive heatsink.
  
• Disk on module. I couldn't get the Shuttle machines to netbook from their build-in ethernet, so I added a disk on module to store the boot code (for Etherboot). The disk on modules plug directly into the IDE slot on the motherboard and are recognized as IDE drives.
  
• A small case. I cant find the one I used, but there are several Micro-ATX or Flex-ATX cases out there.
  

There has already been some work into this. LTSP for your diskless boxes. There is also some info on running MOSIX with LTSP, here.

You can turn the PC's into thin clients.

See: Linux Terminal Server Project

That's what you could do with the PC's. They talk on the site about building both the server and the terminals out of PC's.

Thin client are the way to go. Easier to support, maintain, roll out software to, etc.

Seems to be...but comments from those familiar with LTSP.

go here:

http://www.ltsp.org/contrib/diskless-windows-how to .htm

why do i suspect that this guy is gonna pay someone $150 and then turn around and charge a client $15000 for it? maybe i'm just too cynical after reading about the Fink deal.
*sigh*

I'm running my noisy server (with cheap old disk drives that make a huge racket) in the basement, and in my office I've got an old Pentium with no disk drives and a fanless heatsink. The only fan in the system is in the power supply, and that one's temperature controlled and pretty quiet.

Next step: underclocking the pentium and seeing if I can disable the power supply fan without it burning up.

Now I'll grant you that this is no fire-breathing twitch-game monster setup, but works great for hacking and web surfing, and the quiet is really nice at 3:00am when the wife and kids are all asleep.

My plan would be to use the Linux terminal server project on a main PC stuffed into the basement or wherever, then get one of these for each room in the house that has a TV. No Harddrive needed, just keep all media/data/software on the server box.

From a business point of view: Use "Linux Terminal Server". Yes, get a fat machine to serve all the applications to your users. This way, to modify/update/change/configure.... all the clients means working in a single machine: the fat server.

This is that the city of Largo has done. This is what Linux at schools project is doing.

Actualy, any distribution will do. But I will recommend you to look for a
"support contract" from RedHat, SuSE, Mandarke...

Some links:

Linux Terminal Server Project. You will see that they have packages for any distribution

Linux in Schools. Although it is oriented for schools, school needs are the same as Your Big Comany or Government.

The City of Largo uses Linux as desktop. So it is possible for plain clerks and secretaries to learn and be productive on Linux Desktops.

A worker just needs a working desktop, so he/she can use a word processor and an spreadsheet program. The "configuration and control" must be done byt he Support Team.

And my mom is unable to properly use Windows98. She's not a moronic mom. She is smart. But she has never been trained as computer specialist. But she can use word processing and spreadsheets. Yes, she uses or has used AmiPro, Office, WordPerfect... they are all the same in the end. No FUD about "difficult StarOffice". But when Windows crashes, she enters in panic mode. delete Windows, add Linux and you get no panic mode.

Do not extend FUD.

Use OpenOffice. Fairly soon should be available as a non-beta product.

Easy to use stuff? Try KDE and make it pretty with themes.

Use KDE as the desktop. Easy transition from any user. Install the "Acqua" or "Acqua-Graphite" Theme & "MacOS Loon'n'feel" with top desktop menu for your MacOS users.

Install the Win2000 Theme & "Win2000 Look'n'Feel for your Windows users.

My 2 cents

Kinda weird, that mozilla can parse the bad one (with missing slash) into the correct URL. Didn't notice it was bad until slashcode tacked [http] onto the end instead of the hostname.

go here: Linux Terminal Server Project

For less than 100$ (can.), and about 4 hours work, I put together a X-Terminal in our place. Now me and my roomates can check our email, surf the web even play games while the commercials are on. With a on off, no shutdown stuff, switch and no fans it really bring home the point of what an internet appliance is all about. The suggestion of putting one in the bathroom was turned down however....

Linux Terminal Server Project!