Boot to LTSP from USB pen?

[Eamonn Sullivan]

I have a new toy -- 1 GB USB pen -- that's itching to be used for
something. I'd like to try booting Ubuntu from it, but I'm not sure
what's the best way.

At the moment, I'm running Breezy on a reasonably well-equipped
desktop computer (1 GB of RAM, 2.8GHz processor, etc.) and as many as
three family members can work on it simultaneously via VNC. I connect
most often from a work-supplied IBM Thinkpad (running work-mandated
Windows XP), while the kids use it from a Windows desktop that we have
elsewhere on the network (plus a local user, of course).

However, VNC is a bit complicated for the kids -- they often forget to
kill it, for example, and then I hear complaints when the number of
concurrent X sessions start creeping up.  (Yes, I'm sure I could
configure it to automatically shut down when no one's connected, but
therein lies danger because the kids never save anything...). I'm
wondering if LTSP might be a better solution.

I'm afraid I know very little about LTSP and the docs are rather
involved. I'm wondering if it's possible to just put some code on the
USB pen, boot from there and get a GDM screen from the server. Is
anyone doing anything like this? Any online pointers to some
dirt-simple documentation (step 1, 2, 3, etc.)?

-Eamonn