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After 2 Years of Development, LTSP 5.2 Is Out
The Linux Terminal Server Project has for years been simplifying the task of time-sharing a Linux system by means of X terminals (including repurposed low-end PCs). Now, stgraber writes "After almost two years or work and 994 commits later made by only 14 contributors, the LTSP team is proud to announce that the Linux Terminal Server Project released LTSP 5.2 on Wednesday the 17th of February. As the LTSP team wanted this release to be some kind of a reference point in LTSP's history, LDM (LTSP Display Manager) 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 were released on the same day. Packages for LTSP 5.2, LDM 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 are already in Ubuntu Lucid and a backport for Karmic is available. For other distributions, packages should be available very soon. And the upstream code is, as always, available on Launchpad."
Yes, LTSP has been around for more than 10 years now and is really about making all that easier. It lets the user choose if he wants to connect to a Windows server using RDP or to a Linux box either using X11 over SSH or just using ssh for authentication and X11 clear on the network for better performance. The main addition is having a login manager for that which can call a lot of hooks, mount the home directory directly on the thin client and then mix local and remote applications.
Yeah, you can do it without LTSP. But you don't have to be a guru to stand up an LTSP server and host desktops for thin clients so it's handy for the schools who use it. I've been using it at home for years to host desktops for guests because when the nieces and nephews come over they have incredible computer corrupting skills and need a platform that's less amenable to viruses than my kids' desktops and laptops.
You can also mangle the config to merge in DRBL, which allows me to netboot compute cluster nodes that I get at surplus if I want to do a little recreational number crunching or transcoding. I think it's pretty cool that we live in an age when an ordinary elementary school can have its own supercomputer and if their networking is up to snuff, join the ranks of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
But go ahead and rain on their parade if it makes you feel 1337.
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But do you have sound working? Can you plug in a usb drive on your client and see it on your desktop? Yes you can do all that, but you also need to manage it, and LTSP supports installations of as large as 30,000 desktop clients.
The point is to have a thin client work like a desktop.When it works it is a huge time saver for admins, as you have one server cluster to back up and maintain, and a bunch of diskless workstations that can be unplugged and replaced with no configuration or installation beyond maybe needing to put the mac address in dhcpd.conf
LTSP is probably more work than it's worth if you have less than five work stations, but more than five workstations, and the long term savings probably make it worth the initial time investment, as you need beefy servers and good redundancies, but after you have a high availability server cluster that people are logging into, management as become a lot easier.
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You don't do exactly what the project says it does. The project uses diskless system with no ROM OS to boot to a full X session or RDP session. Jim McQuillan basically wrote a system to duplicte what he was doing for hospitals at the time. When I used LTSP often (from 0.9 to 4.0, circa 2000-2004), the process worked like this:
I'd also like to give a big shout out to Eric Harrison, who made the whole system easy to use for schools with K12LTSP (now K12Linux).
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Sorry, but it's you that doesn't know what he's talking about, since you're too "time share" phobic to find out what's really going on.
Give me an enterprise-class machine (disk access, etc., though two machines would be better) of he same caliber as a high-end desktop from today, and I can run 15-20 cheap diskless clients off of it in a Gbit, switched environment, with the same performance of a low-end desktop from today. 3D accelleration. All the desktop apps. Local storage and printer access. How does that work? The performance comes from shared application libraries among different clients and cached memory on the server.
Yeah, I've done this in production environment. I've done it in my business. I'm not a jobless troll. It works. It saves a ton of money. Users have no idea anything's different than a standard desktop, except that booting is five times faster, and when hardware fails, I can rip a client out, put a new one in, and have the client back up and running in 5 minutes. I fix the broken client on my schedule instead of holding up work for it.
Stop being afraid and learn some new tech.
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