[K12OSN] Current "state of the art" in K12LTSP?

[Warren Togami]

Mark Lindman wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I'm replacing a K12ltsp Centos 5.2 system that was used last year by
> 6 students, with a pair of servers intended to support 30-40 sessions
> total. (ibm x345 dual 3.6Ghz 4G ram no drives $285 each).  With a
> bunch of SCSI drives I figure they ought to do it.  I plan to also
> set up a Fedora Directory server for authentication on another
> computer.
> 
> I installed Edubuntu on the same 6 user system, but it I'm stumbling
> around some of the management as it's so different than the older
> ltsp. I also worry when I read of other folks real-world experience
> with it.  k12ltsp Centos 5.2 has been very stable, but I'm tempted to
> leap to a ltsp 5 system.  Would you use Centos 5.2, or do you think
> of Fedora 9 or openSuSE 11 or ??? with ltsp 5 is ready for
> "production"?
> 
> One consideration is that it's a small school <200 students, I'm a
> 'volunteer' with a full-time job, and there is nobody on site most of
> the time to deal with anything that hangs/locks up, etc.  so it needs
> to be pretty bullet-proof.  Updates, new software, etc. I can do in
> my spare time.  I have three days to get them built and delivered.
> 

CentOS 5.2 based K12LTSP at the moment is very well proven. If you have
3 days to install it and confirm it is working properly then it is the
safest choice.

https://fedorahosted.org/k12linux/
The K12Linux project is successor to K12LTSP. Based on Fedora 9
technology it is far more capable on more hardware and with a wider
variety of software application opportunities. It has proven to be
fairly stable in testing. My main warning to folks deploying this
(especially in a rush) is to be aware of the Fedora 9 maintenance life
cycle. Fedora 9 updates ends 1 month after the release of Fedora 11.
That means theoretically you would want to upgrade possibly during the
Summer 2009 before the next school year. CentOS being based on RHEL5
will enjoy security updates for ~5+ more years now.

http://wtogami.livejournal.com/27610.html
The Live LTSP Server Beta 1 could allow you to (within 10 minutes or so)
test Fedora 9 with LTSP5 technology, booting all of your existing
clients without reinstalling the CentOS 5.2 server. Within 30 minutes
you could reinstall the server from this image.

https://fedorahosted.org/k12linux/
Newer versions with a pile of many minor bug fixes and additional
functionality is now available from Fedora Updates. I am working on Beta
2 of the above media image hopefully for release next week.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com