So...

[Gavin McCullagh]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Simon Ruiz wrote:

> Anyhow, these workstations are far too beefy to be LTSP clients (that is,
> it'd be a waste to use them as such), so they all run as desktops. Last
> year I used Edubuntu on the first batch of computers, and this year as
> I'm redesigning the system we're using I've honestly started using plain
> vanilla Ubuntu.

> So, any ideas? How can I be useful to Edubuntu? Or should I just stick
> with vanilla Ubuntu?

There is such a thing as diskless clients which run all of their own
applications.  This might suit your requirements well.  The idea being that
you provide a PXE boot image and then an NFS shares with home dir and
system image.  Then the desktops do all the work.  This might work well for
you because:

  - it'll make use of all of your good cpus
  - adding new machines involves zero install, you just plug them in and PXE
    boot them
  - client disk failures are not an issue
  - installation of software is only done in one place
  - home directories are stored centrally (although that's easy enough to
    arrange with nfs anyway)
  - you get much better performance on video, sound, etc. as the data
    doesn't have to stream across the network

I don't think edubuntu supports this mode of operation at the minute, but
I imagine it could.  One implementation is called lessdisks, LTSP has
something called LOCAL_APPS, though I'm not sure exactly what that does.

If that would be your ideal Edubuntu setup, maybe you could propose working
on a project to implement that.  I'm only another user of course, it's
possible the Edubuntu people will think this a horrible idea.

Gavin