[K12OSN] Plans for K12Linux EL6 and Future Fedora

Warren Togami Jr. warren at togami.com
Wed May 11 22:15:26 UTC 2011


On 5/9/2011 4:19 AM, Jeff Siddall wrote:
> On 05/08/2011 08:50 AM, Warren Togami Jr. wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> It has been a LONG while since I've been able to look at k12linux.org,
>> but I haven't forgotten about this project.  2007 through 2009 Red Hat
>> generously supported my time to work on this project.  In 2010 I've
>> since left Red Hat in order to help my parents with the family business
>> and prepare for grad school.
>>
>> K12Linux LTSP EL6
>> =================
>> I soon plan on working on a version of LTSP based on EL6.
>
> Thanks Warren, I am eagerly awaiting this as a long term migration
> platform for my current K12Linux systems.

I am reconsidering the worth of working on this project.  This has not 
been much of a positive response.  In fact most of the response has been 
only bitching from people who want everything but are willing to 
contribute nothing.  Not having worked on this for years I had forgot 
how thankless this work is.

I may consider releasing it only if enough people are willing to donate 
to make this thankless grief worthwhile.

>
>> BIGGEST PROBLEM: 32bit EL6 supports a minimum of i686 and they have
>> excluded certain kernel modules required by LTSP like nbd.ko.  For this
>> reason, we may need clients of EL6 to boot images based on Fedora
>> 12/13?/14? that still have userspace capable of running on i586.  I
>> would need to see what are the supported archs and kernels in those
>> versions of Fedora.
>
> Personally I don't care about this really.  Even the lowly Atom is i686
> and as I have argued on this list before the business case for re-using
> old fat desktop hardware doesn't exist if you consider the cost of
> power.  I am far more concerned with the easy manageability LTSP provides.

I have since discovered the actual minimum requirements for 32bit EL6. 
i686 minimum, and the kernel requires PAE hardware.  Some discussion 
seems to suggest it is reasonably easy to rebuild the EL6 kernel without 
PAE.

i686 is considered to be:

* "Pentium Pro or later"
* "AMD K6 (but not all) or later"
* "Via C7" or later
* Geode LX, but not Geode GX

So minimal effort would support only more recent LTSP clients, which I 
guess would be the minority of deployed hardware.

Warren




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