The Excalibur System

[Ryan Oram]

On 10 May 2010 19:41, Jonathon Fernyhough  <j.fernyhough at gmail.com> wrote:
>I'm not quite sure what to make of this. On the one hand you're
>promoting Linux. On the other you're promoting it in order to get free
>board and food at the Uni, promoting yourself and a friend as
>preferred candidates for jobs you're pushing the University to create,
>then asking other people to do large chunks of the work for you.
>You'll have to forgive me if it initially looks a little self-serving;
>creating PPAs of other people's work and filing and triaging bugs on
>your own project can only be a first step (and although it makes your
>karma look good you haven't actually contributed anything).
>
>I'd suggest setting up a prototype system and filing bugs and feature
>requests against Ubuntu, not your pet project. There's no need for a
>"fork" here; we'd just end up with a spork (neither one thing nor the
>other, doing neither job particularly well).
>
>Plus doesn't Fedora have a spin that does all of this already?
>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/K12Linux
>
>Why not try to get this functionality integrated into Edubuntu? Wait,
>no, already done...
>https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP
>
>I guess my question is this: why won't any existing solutions do the job?
>
>Jonathon

Unfortunately, there is nothing currently out there that provides the
specifications I need for my proposal, so I had to create a new system
myself. The client and server are custom designed around the NX Server
and Client (the speed of the remote desktop is not an issue, as NX is
so fast its like you're there). The goal is a full thin client system,
so I will need the minimum possible amount of RAM usage per user to
make this feasible. It is not the base Ubuntu, as I have stripped down
the operating system to the bare essentials and used Xfce as the
interface. Howevere, it was created using packages available in the
Ubuntu repositories, with the exception of the NX Client and Server.

I have ExcaliburServer down to around 80 MB per user. This means with
the $2000 server mentioned in my proposal with 16 GB of RAM and a
quad-core Xeon processor would be enough to power around 150 thin
clients. This is about the total number of computers in the public
labs at Trent. This system is scalable, easy to maintain, and dirt
cheap.

There is more info on the implementation here:
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showpost.php?p=14728478&postcount=2410

BTW I will be contributing as much code back to Ubuntu as possible
with this project and infinityOS. infinityOS is more of a
reorganization of Ubuntu. I fully intend to give back what I take.
Using Launchpad as the base of organization and development for both
projects will make this task even easier.

Thanks,
Ryan