Re: low fat clients

Am Sonntag, den 30.03.2008, 14:45 -0400 schrieb Warren Togami:
> Axel Thimm wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > LTSP5 is supposed to support low fat clients, e.g. simply diskless
> > workstations. I didn't find a direct reference in the LTSP docs, the
> > quote above is mostly from LTSP users/developers comparing to DRBL
> > features as well as a rather manual walkthrough on a UbuntuLTPS wiki
> > page.
> > 
> > Do the bits in rawhide support low fat clients?
> > 
> 
> There are two answers to this...
> 
> 1) Upstream was previously working on something called "local apps 
> support" which allows you to boot LTSP thin clients over the network, 
> login to the remote desktop, then run some applications on the clients 
> themselves.  This might be desirable for multimedia applications for 
> example.  I don't know the status of this, CC upstream.  It is not a 
> priority for me to get this working until we fix the more basic problems 
> for Fedora, but if you can get it working I'm happy to accept patches 
> for upstream.  (As Fedora uses 100% upstream.)
local apps were specced here:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ltsp-local-apps
scott has written teh proof of concept code half a year ago, but nobody
worked on integrating it (i.e. in ubuntu i want the apps to
transparently blend in with the menu and replace the server sided apps
automatically (i.e. if firefox is installed in the chroot and detected
during boot the menu entry should be overlayed by a different launcher
that calls the client side firefox ...))
themeing, printing, plugin installers, sound outpyut and lots of other
stuff need to be worked over to use such a setup. even having the
technical bits in place doesnt gain us much yet as long as there is no
proper integration for teh user side.
> 
> 2) It wouldn't take much to create a ltsp-build-client mode that avoids 
> using ltsp-client-launch and instead runs gdm locally.  You could then 
> network mount /home.  The hard part would be doing some kind of network 
> based authentication (NIS?)  You might want this mode to use a different 
> set of services (normal LTSP disables most of them).  You could 
> implement this as a non-default /etc/ltsp/ltsp-build-client option.  I 
> would be very interested to discuss implementation details and to review 
> patches for this if you are willing to take point.
both distros that yet had official releases of ltsp 5 (debian/ubuntu)
have documentation how to set up local kiosks with a locally running gdm
(ubuntu even ships a plugin for that which you can call with the --kiosk
option) it should be trivial to change that to a setup like described
above ....

also note that gdm's boot sequence number lies before ldm or ltsp-client
in ubuntu and ldm wont start if the display is taken already (i.e. if
gdm starts in S20gdm and claimed :6.0, S30ltsp-client wont start ldm)

ciao
	oli

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