Life after LTSP

[Robert Arkiletian]

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Jordan Erickson
<jerickson at logicalnetworking.net> wrote:
> Robert,
>
> I agree with you on your points, but I think you're missing a couple of
> things in regard to the bigger picture -
>
> 1) Thin clients run at 8-30W of power. Your version of a "power
> efficient and fast desktop system" will consume much more than the
> average thin client, even if the box says "green" all over it.
>

Hi Jordan,

I think you are correct and this is a valid point. The cost of
electricity is important. This is something I would like to definitely
investigate further. I have a kill-a-watt device I will take to work
tomorrow.  My clients are Dell Optiplex 760 with Intel Celeron E1400
(dual core 2.0 Ghz Allendale cores) with Intel Q43 chipset ( X4500
video chip). I will measure power consumption at the login prompt
(*not* including monitor) and post back. But I'm wondering if someone
with a  true thin client system (Dual core Atom) can do the same and
post back.


> 2) Flash and Java honestly aren't LTSP's problem. The LTSP devs have
> done an AMAZING job at trying to accomidate these types of issues with
> proprietary/power hungry softwares, but the fact of the matter is, just
> because Flash and/or Java doesn't perform perfectly all the time under
> LTSP doesn't mean LTSP isn't a viable solution (Maybe not for your
> specific setup though?). Quite the contrary, maybe we should be putting
> more pressure on Adobe/Oracle if we want these things to work better as
> well? (And on a personal side-rant, Flash is horribly resource intensive
> on a standalone workstation, so it really has little to do with LTSP as
> a technology - It eats up plenty of CPU on my home PC).

Agreed. I hope flash dies. With html5/webm on Youtube and Steve Jobs
boycotting flash for mobile gizmos, it's already happening.

>
> 3) Not sure what kind of scenario you mean by scaling full-screen video.
> I can run a bluray fullscreen to my LTSP client (not a localapp) with no
> lag. Of course that *is* one station and not 50 - but put together some
> multicasting magic and I don't see how it could really be a problem, at
> least for playing a single video at the same time. If you need to do
> many separate videos fullscreen at the same time, a simple
> vlc/totem/mplayer localapp will fix that problem straight away. If
> you're talking about flash, see #2.

Multicasting. Always wanted to play with that.

-- 
Robert Arkiletian
Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada