hardy updates and low fat clients

[David Van Assche]

So I upgraded our school server to Hardy and battled with some issues which
surfaced and I'd like to document here for anyone that runs into similar
problems:

1. Firefox 3 beta 5 froze thin clients across the network, freezing not just
the application itself, but other applications too. Reverting to firefox 2
has fixed this completely, and it is certainly a strange issue as I seem to
be the only one that saw this issue. That said, after looking over the
ubuntu forums, there are many users that seem to have reverted to firefox 2
until 3 is not beta anymore.

2. Removable media shows up on everyone's desktops... this was fallout from
the move from gnome-vfs to gvfs, a good move, but bringing up its own set of
problems. This is a known bug and being worked on, and there should be a fix
coming very soon.

3. using the workstation plugin (low fat clients) seems to work wonderfully
under hardy (though need to take out the powerdev user group, and install
flash, ldap, nfs in the chroot.) Anyway, the plugin has simplified the
process to create low fat clients considerably... take a look here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/LTSPFatClients

Other than that, installing Ubuntu Hardy with LTSP support was as easy as
following this guide:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/LTSPQuickInstall

I moved from using 64 bit Ubuntu to using a 32 bit kernel with support for
lots of ram, and this has fixed a plethora of issues for me. My advice for
anyone running 64 bit is to move to 32 bit unless you're running a highly
used web server or something... otherwise, the 64 bit extensions are not
noticeable...

Kind Regards,
David Van Assche
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