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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."
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.
I have been pwned because my
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.
LTSP stands for "Linux Terminal Server Project"
So why does the title read "...LTSP Project"?
That reads Linux Terminal Server Project Project
This is SLASHDOT and you're asking why a lot of the articles are about Linux?
*blinks*
That's like asking why so many of the "articles" on boobdex are porn.
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.
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!"
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.
When their numbers dwindled from 50 to 8, the dwarves began to suspect Hungry.
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...
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Does it put the cover on the TPS reports ?
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.
rest here
Basically, this was a X11 terminal server sort of thing that could also redirect Windows apps. The project was eventually killed, and Ray Noorda picked up the Linux pieces and formed Caldera (later SCO).
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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
I'm running Ximian Desktop at home, and I've got a remote X display in a comfortable, sunny room (servers are in the basement). I can definitely attest that full support of LTSP would be a wonderful thing.
There's lots of talk about Linux desktops replacing Windows desktops, but too many people want to use Linux as a drop-in Windows replacement. That's unfortunate, because to really get the most out of Linux, you have to treat it like Linux -- play up its strengths. 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.
This is, in fact, how the folks in Largo, FL made their system work so well. Everything runs from big servers. The nice thing about this model is that you can roll out dedicated servers for various applications. You could have a big box dedicated to OpenOffice, for example. It would run lots of instances of that application (and you get the associated memory footprint savings) being displayed on everyone's desktops. Easy to deploy, too: you just publish the icon or menu item to fire it up, and it executes remotely and transparently. The user doesn't even know that the app is running on a different server -- not even when he/she goes to load and save files, because you're using NIS and NFS to unify the authentication and the document directories across all servers.
It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. Elegant and seamless. And it's only possible in a Unix/Linux environment -- Microsoft doesn't have anything even close to this. They can't, because it screws up their pricing model. And we all know that money is more important than technology in their world.
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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).
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.
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SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I had a hard time installing LTSP for a demo until a friend suggested using the K12LTSP Iso images. Installation was completely painless using them.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
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.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Our company has been been doing LTSP server installs in local area school for a year, now. In that time we've learned a lot about what LTSP needs and doesn't have and have developed tools to deal with those issues. Novell has a long road ahead of them to deal with that list of challenges. Off the top of my head, here are some common ones:
Novell has their work cut out for them but I think that, ultimately, a company this large will find that the cost of supporting these servers running in places with noone with any Linux knowledge is too high -- they'll get out of the business or their customers will not get sufficient support and leave.
... IMHO, of course.