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."

Comments

Re:Has thin-client computing come of age?

[kabocox]

It's been hyped since the mid-90's, but thin clients have never really caught on in the corporate environment. Why is that?

No, it is because tons of managers that just need IE, Outlook, and Wordpad, opps Word, and Access won't stand it. Managers have to have a scanner, digital camera, video capture cards, and dual monitors. It doesn't matter what they are managing they approve the budget. If it wasn't the manager, it would be the IT guy or the desktop publishing/web guru that needed it. The managers would generally argree that they need to lock down and micromanage all their employees. They want all that on the same platform as all their toys.

Thin clients should be on almost every business desktop. Other than call centers, I'd doubt that will ever happen. Remember if it was good enough for the manager it is good enough for his sec. or assistant.

Re:Why all linux

[kelzer]

At the risk of getting modded down myself:

Hey moderators - please read the moderator guidelines, which state "Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting" and "Average Comments might be slightly offtopic, but still might be worth reading. They might be redundant. They might be a 'Me Too' article. They might say something painfully obvious. They don't detract from the discussion, but they don't necessarily significantly add to it." The parent post fits into this category, and as such probably already had an appropriate score of 1.

If your gut reaction is to mod something down, maybe take a look at the poster's history. This guy is new to Slashdot, he's already posted some worthwhile things. His only other negatively modded post was flagged redundant (another overused moderation). I don't think he meant anything by this post. Yes, it's off-topic, but did it really deserve to get slammed down to -1, the same score as this post?

Please use your mod points more constructively. There are some good posts out there that deserved to be modded up more than the parent post deserved to be modded down.

Thanks.

Interesting... very interesting

[tulare]

Sometimes it's hard not to kick oneself for being an early adopter. I've been successfully deploying LTSP labs at work this year using SuSE 9.0 as a base system, and the project has been a success, but it's been a heck of a lot of work. As we're deploying these as student lab computers in a K12 environment, lockdown is key, so I've had to learn (and make good use of) the KDE Kiosk API, and of course this is before the Kiosk admin tool became available. Additionally, we have an Active directory with accounts for all secondary students, so I got to learn how to compile, install, and configure Samba 3 to get winbind to do some of the tricks I needed it to do besides just auth. Also, our primary students don't have an account of their own but rather use a shared school account, and Mozilla has that very annoying profile problem when a user tries to run multiple instances of it, so I had to write a wrapper so that it could run sandboxed (which also provides the benefit of keeping the kids from setting bizarre configurations which are then replicated to all the other users as they are wont to do in our other labs).

All in all, I'm kind of glad I did all this work by hand - I learned a lot, and most of it is now very easy for me to do. On the other hand, had the rumoured deployment tools been available when I started the project, I would have jumped on that and quick. I'm frankly not sure which is better in the long term, but I know it would have been faster to just click'n'run =]

One last thing - before someone flames me for being stupid and not just using K12LTSP, I have to say I tried it, and didn't like it - for one thing I needed more flexibility than was provided by K12LTSP, especially where AD auth comes in, and besides that, as a matter of preference I like what the KDE Kiosk api provides, and we all know just how much Redhat-based distros Don't Support KDE =] In the end, I got to know the system a lot better, and can do a lot more with it than I would have been able to do under a K12LTSP system. This isn't to disparage the effort and amazing work produced by the K12LTSP team - they really do have an excellent product and I recommend it wholeheartedly for K12 staff needing to get a fast deployment out - it just wasn't the fit I needed for this project.