[K12OSN] A New direction for LTSP: Diskless Remote Boot

[Robert Arkiletian]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 5:14 AM, Rob Owens
<rob.owens at biochemfluidics.com> wrote:
> I agree with most of your arguments in principle.  For me, DRBL could be
> a potential alternative to LTSP.
>
> However, the Atom-based unit you mention uses a 65 watt power supply (I
> didn't see specs on the actual power consumption).  That's small
> compared to a traditional desktop, but it's huge compared to the 6 watt
> thin clients I'm using.
>

65W is the max power rating. The Atom cpu uses 4W. But (on the newegg
link model) the north/south bridge chip uses more. Intel has just
released the newer Poulsbo SCH (Menlow platform) which should take the
whole system down to around 10-12W.

> $150 (plus some money for RAM) doesn't seem like much to me to spend on
> this Atom-based unit, but I live in a developed country and have a good
> job.  In lots of other parts of the world, $150 is unaffordable.  Those
> places need to be able to use a 200MHz P2 with 32MB of RAM as a thin
> client.  Heck, back when I started using LTSP, I needed to use a P2 as a
> thin client because I couldn't afford to buy something for my "little
> experiment".

This is a good point. So perhaps a configuration option which would
turn regular LTSP into Diskless workstation mode. Wonder if it would
be possibly to set it by mac address? That would be cool.

> So I guess I'm saying that DRBL-like capability would be a great
> addition, but I would hate to see the main focus of LTSP turn away from
> low-spec thin clients.
>

Agreed.

-- 
Robert Arkiletian
Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada
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