Proposal to drop Ubuntu alternate CDs for 12.10

[Alkis Georgopoulos]

Στις 28/08/2012 10:49 πμ, ο/η Stéphane Graber έγραψε:
> You seem to be assuming that the Ubuntu desktop media will be containing
> LTSP which it won't.
> Even then, that wouldn't solve the RAID question as no media letting you
> setup RAID will contain LTSP if alternate is removed.

As I said:
>> And it only requires minimal network connectivity to generate the
>> chroot, or a couple of MB of packages in the installation media
>> (ltsp-server, ltsp-client, ldm).

The "minimal network connectivity" part is in order to download the LTSP
packages, like is the case now with language support. Downloading a
couple of MB of packages is acceptable in many cases (as opposed to
hundreds of MB that ltsp-build-client currently needs).

Also, the LTSP packages would be present in the edubuntu DVD.


> The biggest concern we found with that, and the reason why we didn't
> switch to it for 12.10 in Edubuntu is that most thin clients are unable
> to run amd64 code, yet the server ideally should be amd64.

I think shipping a fat-capable chroot by default is more significant
than supporting the amd64 server / i386 client use case. With Unity-2D
and gnome-fallback going away, Unity-3D and gnome-shell not working well
(or at all) over the network, many people are switching to fat clients
(+remoteapps when needed).

Also, having a lot of concurrent users on the server makes the i386 RAM
savings more significant, and many installations prefer i386 on the
server as well.


For the cross-arch case, another idea would be to ask the sysadmin to
download the desktop CDs for both architectures, and use the first
squashfs for the server installation and the second one for the chroot
installation (either from ubiquity, if possible, or post-install).
This will also make amd64/arm combinations possible.