[K12OSN] Project MueKow

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, 2005-03-01 at 17:38, Jim McQuillan wrote:

> Maybe in your world, everybody has P3 and P4 workstations, but ask the
> 80,000 students in So.Africa who are using LTSP, or the 600 schools in
> Peru that are setting up k12ltsp, or the projected 6,000 Telecentros
> locations in Brazil, or even look at the LTSP SuccessStories wiki entry
> at wiki.ltsp.org, and you'll see that old 486's, pentium-I's and II's
> are still VERY popular for deploying as thin clients.
> 
> Almost every day I get reports of people deploying LTSP in areas where
> their only client hardware is old donated equipment, and it's NOT i686
> stuff.
> 
> I'm just not willing to abandon those folks.

I'm not suggesting that you abandon anyone.  I'm asking you to consider
making them a subset of an install that also permits fat clients because
it isn't any harder - just a matter of what programs exist in the
NFS-mounted directories and how you choose to execute them at startup.
Having all of KDE available on the knoppix CD doesn't make it any
worse as a thin client if you start it with 'knoppix 2' at the boot
prompt and start X with 'X -query server'.  The same applies to having
a full system available under the NFS mount.  If you want to only
support the 386 arch yourself so one mount point handles all of the
x86 family, that's reasonable as long as the tools are around to
set up the others.  Someone would have to measure performance to see
if it makes much difference for the rest of the x86's, but you need
them for the other CPU types anyway.

I'm partly basing my hardware view on the ease of finding used PII/III
boxes from recyclers in the $80-99 range, but I'll bet many of the same
people who are using 486/P1's would like to squeeze all the performance
possible out of the servers they have to buy, and they probably have at
least some faster boxes wasting cycles as thin clients - or will have
them in the near future.  If the NFS mounts contain a mostly-complete
distribution (and the price is right for those...), it becomes a
run-time option for how little or much to run on the client with no
change needed to keep the current thin behavior.  There is more work
involved to make local apps/local desktop work seamlessly, but with
the right infrastructure, those can be added a piece at a time to
fill the current gap between thin/fat clients.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com