low fat clients

[Warren Togami]

Axel Thimm wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> LTSP5 is supposed to support low fat clients, e.g. simply diskless
> workstations. I didn't find a direct reference in the LTSP docs, the
> quote above is mostly from LTSP users/developers comparing to DRBL
> features as well as a rather manual walkthrough on a UbuntuLTPS wiki
> page.
> 
> Do the bits in rawhide support low fat clients?
> 

There are two answers to this...

1) Upstream was previously working on something called "local apps 
support" which allows you to boot LTSP thin clients over the network, 
login to the remote desktop, then run some applications on the clients 
themselves.  This might be desirable for multimedia applications for 
example.  I don't know the status of this, CC upstream.  It is not a 
priority for me to get this working until we fix the more basic problems 
for Fedora, but if you can get it working I'm happy to accept patches 
for upstream.  (As Fedora uses 100% upstream.)

2) It wouldn't take much to create a ltsp-build-client mode that avoids 
using ltsp-client-launch and instead runs gdm locally.  You could then 
network mount /home.  The hard part would be doing some kind of network 
based authentication (NIS?)  You might want this mode to use a different 
set of services (normal LTSP disables most of them).  You could 
implement this as a non-default /etc/ltsp/ltsp-build-client option.  I 
would be very interested to discuss implementation details and to review 
patches for this if you are willing to take point.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com