[K12OSN] Project MueKow

Jim McQuillan jam at mcquil.com
Wed Mar 2 04:01:33 UTC 2005


Les,

At first, it felt like we were arguing about this, but as we go through
this, it's clear to me that we are exactly on the same page.

The beauty of using the distro pkg mgmt tools is that we can easily load
up a full system into the LTSP tree.  If it's Debian, a simple
'apt-get install gnome',  or 'apt-get install openoffice.org' in a
chrooted environment is all you'd need to do, to get the packages that
you want. In fact, you should be able to run 'tasksel', and choose
'desktop', 'web server', 'development' or whatever.

People have been asking me for quite a while about running OOo locally,
and i've always recommended against it.  Now, we should be able to
easily try it, and see if my theory about OOo being a lousy local app is
correct.  In fact, i'd love to have somebody prove that theory wrong.

We'll need to develop the app-launching glue, to run some stuff
locally, and some stuff remotely, but we need that anyway.

Jim.





On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Les Mikesell wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-03-01 at 17:38, Jim McQuillan wrote:
>
> > Maybe in your world, everybody has P3 and P4 workstations, but ask the
> > 80,000 students in So.Africa who are using LTSP, or the 600 schools in
> > Peru that are setting up k12ltsp, or the projected 6,000 Telecentros
> > locations in Brazil, or even look at the LTSP SuccessStories wiki entry
> > at wiki.ltsp.org, and you'll see that old 486's, pentium-I's and II's
> > are still VERY popular for deploying as thin clients.
> >
> > Almost every day I get reports of people deploying LTSP in areas where
> > their only client hardware is old donated equipment, and it's NOT i686
> > stuff.
> >
> > I'm just not willing to abandon those folks.
>
> I'm not suggesting that you abandon anyone.  I'm asking you to consider
> making them a subset of an install that also permits fat clients because
> it isn't any harder - just a matter of what programs exist in the
> NFS-mounted directories and how you choose to execute them at startup.
> Having all of KDE available on the knoppix CD doesn't make it any
> worse as a thin client if you start it with 'knoppix 2' at the boot
> prompt and start X with 'X -query server'.  The same applies to having
> a full system available under the NFS mount.  If you want to only
> support the 386 arch yourself so one mount point handles all of the
> x86 family, that's reasonable as long as the tools are around to
> set up the others.  Someone would have to measure performance to see
> if it makes much difference for the rest of the x86's, but you need
> them for the other CPU types anyway.
>
> I'm partly basing my hardware view on the ease of finding used PII/III
> boxes from recyclers in the $80-99 range, but I'll bet many of the same
> people who are using 486/P1's would like to squeeze all the performance
> possible out of the servers they have to buy, and they probably have at
> least some faster boxes wasting cycles as thin clients - or will have
> them in the near future.  If the NFS mounts contain a mostly-complete
> distribution (and the price is right for those...), it becomes a
> run-time option for how little or much to run on the client with no
> change needed to keep the current thin behavior.  There is more work
> involved to make local apps/local desktop work seamlessly, but with
> the right infrastructure, those can be added a piece at a time to
> fill the current gap between thin/fat clients.
>
> --
>   Les Mikesell
>    les at futuresource.com
>
>
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