[K12OSN] Centos7 : some ( official )help wanted

Thu Jul 2 07:16:43 UTC 2015

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Jim,

Thanks you for your
clear explanation. It means, that there are two separated cases. The
first one is the K12Linux's usefulness and the second one closing
down the project.  In spite of K12Linux's usefulness this project is
shutting down. Is it appropriate understanding?

If yes, I regret. I
don't evaluate why, but I regret.

Are there any
chances to reanimate K12Linux project?

Best regards,

Radek

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Kinney" <jim.kinney at gmail.com>
Sent: Wed, 7/1/2015 9:10pm
To: "Support list for open source software in schools." <k12osn at redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [K12OSN] Centos7 : some ( official )help wanted

On Wed, 2015-07-01 at 17:24 +0200, johan.vermeulen7 at telenet.be wrote:

Van: "Warren Togami Jr." <warren at togami.com>
Aan: "Support list for open source software in schools." <k12osn at redhat.com>
Verzonden: Woensdag 1 juli 2015 17:09:42
Onderwerp: Re: [K12OSN] Centos7 : some ( official )help wanted

Disagree all you want.  If no developer is willing to do the work, then it cannot happen.
On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 1:00 AM, <johan.vermeulen7 at telenet.be> wrote:
Hello,

I have good results on our first site where we run K12Linux on Centos7 and I am about to ugrade a second, larger
site as well.

I just had a look at the K12Linux website again and just wanted to say I don't agree with this:

Modern users probably do not want to use this type of thin client because video (like Youtube) requires too much bandwidth over remote X desktops, and scalability of X over ssh encrypted tunnels is rather poor. K12Linux is considered a legacy solution for existing deployments of LTSP-type networks and is currently supported only on the legacy EPEL6 platform. Porting to more modern systemd-based Fedora and EPEL7 is technically possible but is not considered a priority given the drawbacks of the legacy LTSP solution.

I think a lot of organsisations have employees who 's first priority is not watching youtube, all though my users have no problems with that on K12Linux.
What hurts me is that because people can not get this to work on Centos7/Rhel7, they are moving to Ubuntu.

I have K12Linux/Centos6 running for about 3 years, and it's incredibly robust. And I think it's the same on Centos7.

greetings, Johan

Warren,

Then it should say on the site " no developer wants to do the work".
Now it says K12Linux is legacy.

And Warren, I am grateful for the work that you put in for K12Linux.

What I'm saying here, and I think what Radek is saying, is it's not legacy, It works.

Legacy doesn't mean it doesn't work. It simply means no further development will be done for that particular setup. Sometimes a program becomes legacy because no one is working on it. Sometimes because it get superseded by newer projects.
K12Linux on CentOS 6 is a great tool. But porting it to be fully CentOS 7 ready will require development from people other than Warren. K12Linux will be around for many more years since CentOS 6 will be around as well.
I think it's time to look at alternate methods of achieving a similar result. The PXE boot aspect will need to stay but the server platform needs to be revisited. The IT world has embraced virtual machines. Maybe a thin client should be running a VM client that provides console to a remote VM running on a server farm. The spice client is remarkably light and can push screen bits as well if not better than NX and RDP (and way faster than X over SSH or VNC). Using a management tool like Ovirt would allow tech support to build and maintain student machines as pool devices and thus only require updates to a single machine. Some coding is required to provide a single sign on screen that would connect to the next available VM console (which then auto-mounts the students home directory). The VM client (spice) can be 32 bit as well as 64 so it will run on older client hardware and it supports USB pass through for thumb drives. Sound also works.
3 years ago I was doing a demo talk of Ovirt and connected through 2 layers of VPNs back to my work lab to show both windows and Linux desktops. I started a browser and went to YouTube and the flash video played smoothly and with sound synched to the video.
As KVM, the technology behind Ovirt virtual machines, supports "memory ballooning", different VMs that need to use the same block of memory can share the block (read only - best for OS and application memory) and thus can perform similar types of resource sharing that K12Linux provided. Best of all, each user is truly isolated from all the others so an application crash (ahem - flash) will only affect the single user even with shared memory.

Greetings, Johan

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For more info see <http://www.k12os.org>-- 
James P. Kinney III

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you
gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his
own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain

http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
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