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Will Novell Adopt The LTSP Project?
SafeTinspector writes "Yesterday I attended a Novell/HP Linux seminer "Delivering & Deploying Linux Across the Enterprise"
Among the boring and expected stuff, the Novell representative had several slides in his presentation claiming that Novell is going to get heavily involved with LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) to bring policy based security and administration to the LTSP similar to those found in Microsoft and Citrix terminal servers--probably through their venerable Zenworks product line.
Also heavily hinted at would be an install wizard provided by Novell that would greatly simplify the installation and configuration of LTSP, which is currently quite complex.
I can find no hard information about this on LTSP or Novell websites, nor any information within Google newsgroup search. Does anyone know more about this?
On a side note, the laptops of both the HP rep and Novell rep were running SuSE Linux Desktop with Ximian XD2 installed and the presentation was made using OpenOffice Presentation."
I am a developer that make extensive use of ltsp. I also use SuSE for the server that LTSP runs on.
o rg
I can say from fist hand experience that installing and configuring ltsp is not as difficult as suggested.
The install scripts worked as expected on my SuSE 9 install.
Tech support for ltsp is wonderfull! Any questions can be answered in on on line chat room on freenode.net #ltsp
I just asked the main developer for ltsp about novell and he said it was news to him. I would invite him to comment directly to this thread.
Also, on a side note, disklessworkstations.com has very inexpensive boxes that just work when plugged into a network that has an ltsp server installed on it.
There is a sister project k12ltsp that is to quote Jim McQuillen, "k12ltsp is a distro built around Fedora, that includes ltsp".
websites for these projects are
ltsp.org
disklessworkstations.com
k12ltsp.
B-)
A friend will come and bail you out of jail, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "damn that was fun!"
The advantage of LTSP is you don't need the full operating system on the client. The client can be booted off floppy or boot rom and still connect by X.
If you are using ssh+x forwarding the client still has to have an operating system.
K12LTSP is a very simple way of installing LTSP. Current version 4 is based on Fedora Core 1 with a few updates. As easy to install as FC1.
Although thin clients have been around for a few years now, in those days 300 MHz server CPUs and 10 Mbit/sec Ethernet were top-of-affordable-range. And the performance was a bit clunky.
Now we have 3000 MHz servers and 100 Mbit/sec networks, thin clients can really fly. So long as you forget the clunky days and try them!
Andrew Yeomans
Want to play with this? Pop a Knoppix CD into any X86 machine on your network and try 'knopixterminalserver' (from the command line or the KDE menus).