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

Reinventing X?

[ObviousGuy]

We all like to decry all the networking cruft that X has designed into it, but this kind of participation of a first tier vendor like Novell in redeveloping the X remote terminal service really shows how necessary all that cruft really is.

It doesn't really explain why they feel the need to reinvent the wheel, but it just goes to show how far Linux has come when it can attract the likes of Novell into its growing ranks of corporate sponsors.

Re:Reinventing X?

[afidel]

Sorry but X SUCKS compared to RDP/ICA. I can be quite productive using RDP on a 28.8 dialup line if I turn on bitmap caching and turn down the resolution/bpp. X on the otherhand is almost unusable across a slow DSL line. Multiply this times hundreds or thousands of employees and the bandwidth savings are HUGE. X was great for when it was invented but it doesn't hold a candle to RDP/ICA.

Re:Reinventing X?

[afidel]

Yes, and I was talking about bandwidth, not the particular technology. An RDP session with bitmap caching running at 800*600*16bpp or 1024*768*8bpp is completely usable with the bandwidth of a 28.8 modem, whereas X is often unresponsive over a 604/128 DSL line.

Re:Reinventing X?

[afidel]

Seven clients, whoopee. We run between 30 and 50 clients per server. These are typically Dual Xeon's with 2GB of ram, decent but not terribly expensive servers. The problem with X is that it sends the entire bitmap across every time there is an update, whereas RDP/ICA caches the bitmap and will reuse it, even across sessions. This makes for some heavy network traffic. Add to RDP the advantage of not losing the session because of network or client problems and it's a clear winner. I loved X when I first used it but since starting with my current employer where most of our clients run Citrix I have become a real convert, and not because of techno-religion but because the stuff is just downright better.

Re:Reinventing X?

[phoenix_rizzen]

Have a look at NX from NoMachine. Haven't had a chance to use it yet, but reading through the available docs, it works better than VNC/RDP/ICA, using the standard X protocol. It just compresses things, combines commands, and caches a lot of regularly-used info/commands on the client computer. It can also be used with VNC/RDP to make them run even faster.

Their goal, and supposedly they've achieved it, it to be able to use standard X apps across a 9600 bps modem.

They've also got a tesdrive server you can connect to to try things out.

Codenamed:Project Sundance

[Krondor]

I attended this same conference, and I was asking a question about LTSP and EDirectory authentication. The presenter took my information and said this is called Project Sundance and he would email me with additional information the closed beta is supposed to start in the next 6 months.

Has thin-client computing come of age?

[genericacct]

It's been hyped since the mid-90's, but thin clients have never really caught on in the corporate environment. Why is that? Perhaps the low cost and ubiquity of [GNU/]Linux can give the adoption of thin clients a much needed boost.

MMMM....LTSP goodness

[thgreatoz]

If you're talking about the one in Southfield, then I was there as well. The implications of a Novell LTSP adoption almost had me drooling.
One of my colleagues and I had an opportunity to talk to a Novell engineer about it, and he said that Novell was indeed working very closely with the developers of LTSP, and that closed betas of the result of that collaberation would be starting in a few months.
An interesting side note -- the main presenter made a comment in that same conversation that he was "positively humbled" by the volume of people that were involved in the development of open source projects, and not only that, but the degree of intellect that these developers display regularly in the various IRC channels and usenet groups.

Re:MMMM....LTSP goodness

[chupacabrito]

How come Jim McQuillen doen't know about this? He is the lead developer. I have been with the project for years and know nothing about this either.

Terminal services replacement

[Adriax]

If they make a live-cd client (maybe live floppy), I'll be mucho happy.
I'd love to be able to offer customers a cheaper alternative to the overprices winterm dummy terminals out there.

Mini-itx board, small case, single drive, live-cd client, run this on the server with OO.org, mozilla, etc...
Heck of a lot cheaper than Win2k advanced server + terminal serviced + licenses + office and licenses...

LTSP vs. SSH + X Forwarding

[Eagle5596]

Can someone please explain to me how this is different/better than using SSH with X Forwarding? I run a server at home which I use in a manner similar to what I understand of thin clients, connecting to it remotely via SSH, and then forwarding the displays to my terminal. How is this different? Am I missing something?

Re:LTSP vs. SSH + X Forwarding

[Anonymous Coward]

As has been pointed out your running a "fat" OS on probably and even "fatter" machine. With a LTSP Server and a machine from disklessworkstations.com you just plug a station in a go. Your setup requires and actual OS to be hand installed and also requires a hard disk.

So technically your both running X remotely but from a hardware and administrative point of view its completely different.
Have a look at this box to get a glimpse at the potential.
http://www.disklessworkstations.com/cg i-bin/web/20 0009.html?id=rAcEmuqj

Now if you were running a retail business and needed 20 POS machines which is more appealing? How about if you running a school or company where you need 1,000 machines to all run the same 5 apps? You can sort of replicate this by buying 1,000 of the same machines from say Dell and making your own image but really that is a ton more work in the end.

A properly setup LTSP server and it associated thin clients are a real sight to behold. These thin clients often have no fans and are therefore silent and are also tiny and cheap. If one breaks drop another one in and Instantly your productive again with zero clientside configuration. Its not for everyone but where it does fit it works like a charm.

Re:LTSP vs. SSH + X Forwarding

[dbIII]

The advantage of LTSP is you don't need the full operating system on the client.

Unfortunately that is not correct.

While Microsoft may have conned some into thinking that the browser is part of the operating system, the reality is the operating system is the layer that works between the hardware and the software.

In this case the client still needs an operating system, but only needs enough in the way of applications to communicate with the terminal server and relay the users input to it. There are fairly lean implementations of X as well that run on thin clients - NCD has had one for years, as do several others.

Hopefully this whole thing is not some pointy haired MS/citrix catch up thing initiated by people that had never heard of X - because MS will certainly portray it that way. It doesn't make sense that sending bitmaps down the wire is going to magicly be more efficient than sending a few bytes every now and again for events - but some clever coding (detect window movements and only re-broadcast freshly exposed areas) and using better compression can get around it. You may even get much better results than XFree86, which is mainly drivers tacked on to the open groups reference version of X, and has made no effort to let people know that compression is supported. Decent widely available documentaion on running X on slow networks would change things - but until then everyone just uses the hack of shh because it is easy and you want your stuff encrypted anyway.

The whole beauty of X is that you can have people with win2k desktops with windows open from linux, solaris and AIX machines cutting and pasting their work into MS Powerpoint presentations (now the main reason to have MS licences). It's very hard to do something like that another way without duplicating the applications - the one login/one person/one desktop idea is applying to less people all the time in these days of VPNs.

Quite complex not actually

[Donny Smith]

>greatly simplify the installation and configuration of LTSP, which is currently quite complex.

What? You mean "quite simple"?

"Greatly simplify", I presume, stands for "tie up with Novell's proprietary stuff".
How much easier can it get?

Downloads at:
http://www.k12ltsp.org/download.html

running 150 desktops here

[codepunk]

I am currently running 150 desktops off of two servers using thin client deployment. Instead of going with ltsp we use a slackware live cd that gets it's final config from a web server using wget and a php script that passes out configurations based on the sent mac address.

Finally it just lanches x against the servers using the -query option. This is one hell of a lot simpler than ltsp and we do not have to worry about nfs mounted root or none of that junk.

The servers are actually redhat AS 3.0 running in clustered mode. Now if redhat would just hurry the up and release GFS I could run a shared /home which would be really cool.

The gnome guys could also help out greatly by adding the ability to deploy desktop icons to multiple users from say root's desktop. I have scripts to do this but it would be nice to have it
as a option to creating a link to a application.

Eating your own dogfood

[Marcus Erroneous]

I'm always happy to see them eating their own dogfood. Especially after reading an article where the presenter talked Linux but used a Mac with M$ Powerpoint for his presentation. Running Linux and using OpenOffice for their presentation shows that they at least use and know something about the Linux environment. It's kind of hard for me to take you seriously about your commitment to a Linux product line when you're using M$ products. If your company has so few people that are Linux literate that they have to send M$ drones to represent them, how do you expect to produce a native Linux product? I wish them success and hope for the best. But, their failure won't stop me from using my Linux boxen. ;)

Wouldn't it be nice

[Action_Jax]

If they could work on other enhancements to LTSP or X such as "screen" like session management or vnc session management or load balancing like Citrix.

I think its greating them getting involved, LTSP is quite a mature project and while I'm not quite sure what kind of extra value they would add hopefully they will be looking at solidifying LDAP/Edirectory integration and other enhancements (like bandwidth optimisation).

Are you a shill?

[ripcrd]

I've seen these posts about NX over the last few days and I'm not sure if you are just impressed by the product as a user or a shill for the company to sell more licenses.

IIRC, Novell just bought a company that made a Live Linux CD (Knoppix derivative) with all the free Novell client tools and some sort of Citrix (or NX) like software for terminal serving. It was something like Novix or something. I found a link to them on the Knoppix Cousins page.
http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/Knopp ixCusto mizations

What's wrong if Novell want to contribute to an Open Source project of their choice? It may be that Novell chose LTSP because it will fit more of the situations they are looking at than NX.

Suse & openoffice manditory for Novell workers

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for an IBM business partner in The Netherlands and am working on a project with Novell here.
There was a presentation a few weeks ago and the entire Novell staff was upset to say the least that they where forced within the timespan of 2 weeks to install openoffice and remove ms office from there desktops and laptops.
The presentation was therefor the first build with openoffice and let me tell you...that was interesting to say the least.
These poor people at Novell Holland need some Openoffice training !

Sad that Novell/SuSE did not choose NoMachine

[Anonymous Coward]

I just read yesterday that RedHat went through some sort of partnership with Citrix. Now I read that Novell is going to support LTSP to provide "policy based security and administration to the LTSP similar to those found in Microsoft and Citrix terminal servers". This is exactly the goal of the NX project, developed by NoMachine. As CEO of NoMachine I repetedly invited SUSE and RedHat to look at our product and bundle our offering with their Linux servers. Unfortunately I never received any response. This is quite unfortunate as, judging from their recent moves, there is a significant customer demand.

On the technology side of the story, the LTSP project produces a fantastic Linux distribution aimed at thin-clients and I'm reall glad it's seeing increased corporate interest. LTSP lets users boot their machine over the network and runs a X server on the client. Unfortunately bringing X-Window over the Internet is a completely different story. We have been working long enough on bringing X-Window on-par with Citrix that I hardly see LTSP comparing in this field.

I hope to see more interest about NX in the Linux world in future as I really see a need for an OSS alternative to Microsoft and Citrix dominance in this field.

Gian Filippo Pinzari - NoMachine

Re:LTSP + Ximian Desktop == killer!

[moonwind]

@IGnatius T Foobar:

"The remotability of X11 on a window by window basis (as opposed to the whole desktop, which is how it's done in Windows) is central to this."
-------
I'm sorry, I have bad news to you (and I hate to say it): Citrix/ICA can do "window by window" remoting already a long time. and Microsoft's RDP (Remote Desktop Protokol) in their latest versions can do it too. Plus, both take less bandwidth than X. And both are snappier than X, with less latency for the user. And both can near-seamlessly print from the application server to the locally atttached printer of the (maybe Thin) Client. And both can detach from a running session and re-attach to it again (even from another client, effectively providing "session migration").. Can X11 do this too? It is a set of features that is absolutely essential in an enterprise environment of fat servers/thin clients. (Yes, I know Citrix and Windows Terminal Servers cost more money than X11 which ships for free on Linux)

But stay comfortable, I have also some good news for ya (and I luv it):

• The current version of NX/NoMachine, a highly efficient, GPL'd X11 compressor, supports this:
• run with the same speed (or faster) and consume the same low bandwidht (or lower) as Citrix/ICA and Microsoft/RDP. Ths will proof to be a pretty big asset for X11 in the future battle for the enterprise desktops.
• tunnel Citrix/ICA and Microsoft/RDP through its own connection. This will enable all NX clients to seemlessly access and bring to their desktops remote Windows sreens at a better speed than vanilla ICA/RDP.
• support access to X11 applicationss from Windows, Mac OS X, Zaurus, iPAQ and mobil phones. This is the start of ubiquitous desktop computing where my own desktop follows me to wherever I roam. I can even access it from booting the latest Knoppix (V3.4)

• And one of the next releases of NX/NoMachine will provide this:
• support the display of single application windows from remote Windows Terminal Servers. This will make Windows --> Linux desktop migration scenarios much smoother -- you can offer a better way of keeping a lifeline back to the MS world for the transitional period where your users still need it for lack of a Linux implementation of a particular software.
• support the de-taching and re-attaching from an X11 application without loosing the session.. This will enable "session migration": stop working in office, go home, kiss baby, have dinner, say goodnight to kids, finish that damn important document for next morning by dialing into your still running desktop session from home.
• support seamless printing from X11 applicaton server to locally attached printer. The benefit is pretty obvious.

Those who don't know about NX by now are missing something really cool and useful.

Hey, and it case you haven't noticed: I said it is GPL! Yes, GPL licensed!! (OK -- NoMachine as the NX inventors have dual-licensed:it to themselves, and they are also building and selling a commercial product on top of the exact same GPL libraries.... So what? Trolltech do this with Qt, Codeweavers do this with WINE, MySQL do this with MySQL and Redhat do this with the Linux kernel. Let NoMachine also pay their own developers.)

Oh, and in case I forgot to mention it: NX is really cool. See also this paper from Linux-Kongress 2003

Re:I doubt they will find it as easy as they think

[RustyTaco]

# Devices connected to thin clients are extremely difficult to bind back to the server for enumeration and individual user access. Think users in different rooms want to print to their printer on their desk. Our tools handle that but took months to develop.

Really? I just did a quick lookup in the login script to set the PRINTER environment variable to the right printer depending on the hostname/display (depending on if it was an LTSP terminal or full Linux system). It's a little ugly but dead simple. If you're using CUPS (as you probably should for sanity sake) use lpoptions -d printer instead of export PRINTER=printer.

- RustyTaco