[K12OSN] Project MueKow

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, 2005-03-01 at 12:14, Jim McQuillan wrote:

>      http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/MueKow
> 
> Please read through it, and give us some feedback. 

If you are going to make this kind of change, why keep the
/opt/ltsp/i386 copies at all, at least for machines of the
same CPU type?  Why not boot all clients as though they would
run as fat clients, mounting the native binaries from the host but
on the weaker ones continue to run the desktop remotely?

http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/stateless/ seems to be on the right
track although they seem a little carried away with duplicating a
snapshot image for the clients to run instead of mounting the live
server binaries (hasn't Solaris offered that for ages?).  Why not
back a thin-client startup (X -query server) into that framework,
leaving the option to run anything you want as a local app on any
client?   Knoppix also has a workable client-boot configuration
although they obviously have already had to deal with the distribution
image being mounted read-only.

For a P300 and up, running a local desktop starts to make sense.
The 'windows years' have left us with tons of obsolete hardware designed
to run a desktop and commodity-priced servers that can only handle 30
or so clients.   If your goal is to recycle the clients it makes sense
to take advantage of their power to reduce the need for new servers by
running the desktop and/or some apps locally.  If you network-mount the
appropriate binaries you can do this without maintaining anything on the
clients.  There will be some extra work to support multiple platforms
but it would just amount to maintaining appropriate NFS exported
directories for them which you have to do anyway.  A simple approach
for this would be to use a run-from-cd version of the distribution
in question on a client to mount/install/update the binaries, or
use a knoppix-like scheme where you actually export the CD or a
HD copy of it.

There are still several problems to solve.  One is the difficulty in
making menus that launch things in the right place if you want to mix
and match local and remote apps.  X can run things where you want, but
how do you build menu items that know that some clients should run a
program as a local app, some on the ltsp server, and maybe others from
a special app server?   Or is cluster technology coming along fast
that before you can work this out you would be able to launch a program
locally and let it migrate itself it that would be better?  This:
http://kerrighed.org/what_is_kerrighed.html looks promising, but not
complete yet.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com