LTSP or Stateless Linux

[Havoc Pennington]

On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 16:16 -0400, John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> A simple distinction is that with LTSP the computer is just a dumb
> terminal displaying programs being run on a more powerful server.
> Stateless installs the OS image on the client where the programs are
> run.  This allows a person to detach the computer from the network and
> still have it be usable.

Don't confuse the "cached client" mode with stateless linux in general.
The idea is that we treat an NFS root filesystem with only an X server
installed (similar to LTSP) in the same framework as an NFS root
filesystem with a full set of apps installed, or the cached client mode,
or a live CD mode. The definition I would give of stateless linux in
general is "sharing the same OS instance between multiple
machines" (which implies the OS instance is read-only, and contains no
per-machine state - those are the things that require OS changes)

Havoc