LTSP or Stateless Linux

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 21:30 +0200, Adriano Galano wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 18:29:23 +0200, Xose Vazquez Perez <xose at wanadoo.es> wrote:
> > Adriano Galano wrote:
> > 
> > > Hello:
> > 
> > buenas,
> > 
> Hello Xose (Buenas ;-)):
> 
> > > Could sometbody tell me the differences between LTSP and Stateless
> > > Linux project? How they compares? In wich situations is more
> > > recomendable one type of the architecture or other?
> > 
> > you can get detailed information from :
> > http://people.redhat.com/~hp/stateless/StatelessLinux.pdf
> > http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/stateless/
> >
> 
> Yes I read it, thanks. But I have doubs about when apply LTSP or Stateless.
> What are the advantages of Stateless over LTSP deployment?

A simple distinction is that with LTSP the computer is just a dumb
terminal displaying programs being run on a more powerful server.
Stateless installs the OS image on the client where the programs are
run.  This allows a person to detach the computer from the network and
still have it be usable.  When he/she plugs back in the user's changes
are synced back to the server.  It is Stateless because root setting are
never changed.  A user can go to another computer, log in and come up
with the same desktop they had.  You can do cool things like upgrade to
the latest hardware simply by plugging it into the network and booting
up with a stateless Linux image.  It basically gives the benefits of
central management of OS images that LTSP gives while still retaining
the benefits of programs running directly on users hardware.  So it is
the best of both thin and fat client technologies.  Of course there are
drawbacks such as need for powerful hardware at the client and bigger
disks but with hardware prices dropping so much that is not as much of a
concern.

Also Stateless Linux is much more than a project.  It is a whole
mentality on how Fedora is now developed.  For instance a lot of the
configurations tools for things like printers and network are being
designed so they do not require root state.  

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri
Associate Software Engineer
Desktop Group
Red Hat, Inc.
Blog: http://martianrock.com