[K12OSN] Clients with 64MB of RAM

[Almquist Burke]

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On Jan 11, 2010, at 9:39 PM, Barry Cisna wrote:

> Almquist,
>
> When you say Fedora12 ,I assume you mean K12linux/LTSP5?
Yes I am.

> 64MB will never come close to being enough ram for ltsp5. 128mb on the
> TC is not enough realistically.
I'd say 128 MB is the new minimum for LTSP 5. Or, more accurately,  
LTSP 5 as implemented on newer versions of fedora. I guess I don't  
expect them to get it working on 64MB clients, I'm just hoping my  
GX1s aren't about to become unusable in Fedora 13 or 14.

> Just an FYI: I found the following,and this does not mean anything  
> other
> than a baseline. I merely done to this to try and determine why  
> ltsp5 is
> so much more memory intensive than ltsp4.x.
>
>
> My Ebox2300/128MB will work( but not really usable) on LTSP5 but takes
> almost 4-5 minutes to boot up.
My GX1s only have 128MB but they seem to boot much more quickly

> On ltsp4.x it takes about 30 seconds to boot to login screen,and works
> great on anything you throw at it(Even Youtube and any video format).
> Wish I was smart enough to understand what the underpinnings of LTSP5
> makes it so much more a memory pig as compared to ltsp 4.x?
> The bootup,PXE is the same protocol for both so my guess is 'just the
> kernel' has more voodoo thrown into it that causes the overhead for  
> the
> TC's?
>
	From what I can tell, the additional burden of LTSP 5 comes mostly  
from using the distro's own build tools, and a tiny bit from things  
like increasing the size of existing code or new LTSP features.
	LTSP before version 5 was essentially it's own mini-distro and it  
contained the minimum amount of software needed to boot up a thin  
client and get and working X session and stuff like sound and local  
devices. You could add it into any distro by putting it in a folder,  
exporting it as a read-only share (NFS usually) and setting up the  
needed DHCP/TFTP/NFS services plus some other optional ones. K12LTSP  
did this work for us and also bundled useful education apps.
	But maintaining a distro was a lot of work and the LTSP developers  
didn't feel they were adding a lot of value. They had to spend a lot  
of time on things that every distribution works on, and had much less  
time to work on the LTSP specific code. Thus with LTSP 5 they moved  
to a system where they only maintain certain LTSP specific code and  
each distribution has to integrate LTSP.
	Basically, the tradeoff that LTSP made was to make running local  
applications, sound, and supporting more hardware easier. But at the  
cost of requiring beefier clients. Whether you like this tradeoff  
depends on your pool of old clients that don't work well with LTSP 5  
and your desire for the features that LTSP 5 added.


> Take Care,
> Barry Cisna
>
>
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