Fwd: [Ubuntu Wiki] Update of "Edubuntu/specs/specs/lucid/ltsp-gui-install" by jonathan

[Alkis Georgopoulos]

Στις 23-09-2009, ημέρα Τετ, και ώρα 16:44 -0400, ο/η Jordan Mantha
έγραψε:
> <snip> I think this would be awesome for the 10.04 LTS release of
> Edubuntu to have a GUI installer for LTSP so that we can remove that
> from the text-based installer (which require a lot of DVD space) and
> is more convenient for the "average user".

All the following thoughts are based on the idea that duplicate files do
not take extra space on the DVD. If that assumption is wrong, please
ignore the mail. :-)

WHAT
----
It would be better if the LTSP chroot files were on the DVD, because
ltsp-build-client downloads a lot of stuff from the internet and takes
ages even on DSL lines. 

It would be even better if teachers were able to try out LTSP from the
live DVD -slow as it may be- to see if it works for their hardware.


HOW (SIZE)
----------
AFAIK, casper uses squashfs, and squashfs has a switch that searches for
duplicate files and keeps only one physical instance of them.
So in the case where server architecture == chroot architecture, the
whole /opt/ltsp/<arch> will only cost a few MB to have on the DVD.

Of course we can't have /opt/ltsp/IMAGES on the DVD. But the chroot
image can be regenerated in a few minutes with ltsp-update-image.


HOW (LIVE)
----------
Assuming that
 * we don't have /opt/ltsp/images on the DVD, and
 * the teacher doesn't yet have the proposed network setup for LTSP, as
he wants to try it out first before buying switches etc,

a "try-out-ltsp" script could be made that:
 * starts dnsmasq-base (which is in main) in proxydhcp mode so that
clients can be booted even if the server has 1 NIC and a DHCP server
already exists on the local network,
 * calls ltsp-update-sshkeys and ltsp-update-image to generate the
chroot image. Of course that happens in a tmpfs; but for most modern
servers the 200Mb RAM that are needed present no problem.


It's easy to do the above things with a script - I can have such a
script ready in a few days.
I don't know how that script could be included to the DVD building
process, and removed upon hard disk installation, though.
Also, if the user doesn't want to install LTSP, ltsp-server should be
uninstalled and the chroot deleted from the hard disk installation.