Converting standard LTSP to Edubuntu

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 08:52:03PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> ULTSP:
> * Installed from Ubuntu .debs using APT
> * Uses ssh for remote X session (much more secure, better compression
> and encryption (i think) )
> * Has nearly no sound or local device support
> * Changes in upstream Ubuntu directly impacts ULTSP, changes are easy.
> * Upgrades happen through APT, and make LTSP easy to maintain.
> * Not quite sure if it supports swap over NFS yet, seems that it will
> support swap over NBD (more efficient, once again)
> * Printing support?
> 
> Matt involved the LTSP.org team in creating ULTSP, and I think I read
> somewhere that he's working on getting the Ubuntu LTSP into Debian as
> well. Various sources also said that it's going to be used in Fedora and
> SUSE. I wonder if that means it's going to be an Ubuntu based LTSP
> chroot? Or will it be a very clever script that uses the RPM's somehow
> (perhaps with apt4rpm?).

It is already in Debian; i haven't heard anything from the Fedora or
(Open)SuSE communities.

> So LTSP.org has some very little extra functionality, which might be
> crucial to some people. The Ubuntu LTSP is easier to develop on, I
> think. And I think the rate at which it will grow and expand in terms of
> features will be faster. Oliver talked about some fancy Gstreamer
> hackery in Dapper, which will certainly make my life easier. I think
> Dapper will also have local device support, and with APT on the thin
> client systems, and since it already uses ssh, implementing local device
> support should also be easy.

The implementation in Breezy is fairly simplistic, but should meet many
people's needs.  We're working out modern designs for some more advanced
features like local device support and sound during the UBZ summit in
Montreal right now, where we have sizeable chunks of both the Ubuntu and
LTSP development teams in the same room.

> I'm personally very excited about Matt's LTSP implementation. With one
> experiment I apt-getted an entire Ubuntu system in the LTSP environment,
> and used it for a diskless fat client system. I think I saw a spec that
> said that in Dapper Edubuntu will have LDAP support, which will make the
> authentication side of that much easier.

Somewhere out on the todo list, I'd like to make "fatter clients" trivial to
set up, but as you've seen, the existing implementation makes it quite
straightforward to set up if you know what you want and are willing to dig
into it.

-- 
 - mdz