[K12OSN] Preparing K12Linux F11

[Huck]

TP, your post is dead on..

While up until last year it was feasible for us to go with Thin 
Clients..we've worked with local hospitals' IT depts.(in the Portland, 
OR area) to "donate" their old dell optiplex gx240-gx260's to our 
school(s). Basically the IT coordinator gathers them all..images a batch 
depending on the school(s) need and gets them delivered and setup.

So far over 350 machines have been "reused" rather than 'recycled'...
and any gx240 or gx260 is PLENTY of hardware for any elementary school 
around...and still quite adequate for 99% of all small businesses.

I still like LTSP for central authentication and management 
though...call me a knucklehead but I just don't like windows server 
setups, and hardening.

--Huck

Terrell Prude' Jr. wrote:
> Jeff Siddall wrote:
>> It seems like there are two user communities here.  One has legacy
>> hardware (like 486 machines, with no 64 bit servers) and the other,
>> which is the group I belong to, has modern hardware -- exclusively 64
>> bit servers and generally 586+ clients.
>>
>> Given that there is a decade, or perhaps more, of Moore's law separating
>> the two groups it's pretty tough to make both happy!
>>
>> My impression as a relatively new K12Linux user is that it is perhaps
>> the most bleeding edge of all LTSP distros, largely due to the fact that
>> it is based on the latest Fedora, which is one of the most bleeding edge
>> distros.  As such, K12Linux really does not seem like the right place to
>> try to support legacy hardware.
>>
>> Further, LTSP5 is perhaps the wrong version to base a legacy hardware
>> LTSP distro on, given it's significantly increased resource requirements
>> from LTSP4.
>>
>> Two solutions for supporting legacy hardware come to mind.  One is for
>> "someone" to continue to maintain a LTSP4 based distribution on an OS
>> with long term support (ie: CentOS).  The other is for "someone" to
>> create a custom K12Linux spin that takes out a lot of the weight of
>> K12Linux and optimizes it for legacy hardware.  Not sure of the
>> viability of these, or who the magical "someone" might be.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>   
> 
> Fortunately, we already have an excellent LTSP4-based distro today, and 
> that's K12LTSP 5EL, which will be supported until the year 2014.  I'd 
> suggest that any CentOS 6-based K12Linux also include LTSP 4 as an 
> optional "for legacy hardware" installatation.  The Fedora releases 
> should stay bleeding edge, because that's the whole point of Fedora.
> 
> But now we're getting to a point where LTSP might no longer be a good 
> business case.
> 
> The whole point of LTSP was to be able to reuse old computers as thin 
> clients to save both money and the environment.  IIRC, for a time, Jim 
> McQuillan himself even resold Dell OptiPlex GX1's as a thin-client 
> option not so long ago.  If we're now going toward super-powerful (and 
> increasingly expensive) thin client hardware, then we have a problem.  
> As a buyer, I'd be better off spending the extra $20 for a full-fledged 
> PC and install my choice of distro on the hard disk (Ghost, Kickstart, 
> however).  Oh, and I just saved the expense of buying an LTSP server.  
> Whoops....
> 
> Here's an example of what I mean.
> 
> http://www.zareason.com/shop/product.php?productid=16183&cat=249&page=1
> 
> --TP
> 
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