[K12OSN] $600 Pledged Re: Plans for K12Linux EL6 and Future Fedora

[Warren Togami]

On 05/12/2011 05:36 AM, Gavin Spurgeon wrote:
>
> I am sure that I/we/others could do the same with the current upstream
> code on F14, F15 or even EL6/CentOS/SL6.
>
> I have a week of down time from my day-2-day job coming very soon, so
> would have no issue trying get a very basic current upstream version
> built and packaged (.rpm) ready for people to test, I had loads of
> people contact me about testing the .rpm's I built for F13 and loads of
> feedback for users who did play with the packages on both F13&  F14.

I looked at your RPMS at http://www.dageek.co.uk/ltsp/ and noticed a 
notable lack of .src.rpm's.  Although it is not my intent to make Fedora 
work, I want to take your minimal changes and commit them to upstream 
ltsp so we don't have confusing forks.

Technically you are correct: With minimal changes F-14 could be 
installable.  However Fedora is highly problematic with LTSP for several 
reasons.  First, F-14 lacks support for the vast majority of existing 
LTSP client hardware.  The picture is far worse for F-15 due to big 
changes in the core distro.  systemd will require some LTSP surgery, 
while GNOME 3 is a complete non-starter.  Furthermore, Fedora's rapid 
change and short support period makes it undesirable for both LTSP 
development and the target deployment market.  Fedora's rapidly moving 
target often breaks functionality you depend on, while it is completely 
untenable for organizations to upgrade their Fedora LTSP server every 
year in order to keep up with security updates.

For this reason, we would be better off focusing all of our efforts on 
an EL6-based LTSP server.  The target deployment of LTSP wants "legacy" 
desktop environments like GNOME 2.  The entire stack of kernel, drivers, 
desktop environment and security sensitive apps like Firefox will be 
maintained for years, and largely without destabilizing changes during 
that lifetime.

Yes, EL-6 based LTSP has the same client hardware support problem as 
Fedora.  I will do some experimentation here of both rebuilding the 
entire client distro to i586 or using a Debian /opt/ltsp/i386, to 
determine which requires less effort to support in the coming years.

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com