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.

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...

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. ;)

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.