[K12OSN] Centos7 : some ( official )help wanted

[Warren Togami Jr.]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 12:10 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 superseded by newer projects.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.
>

Thank you.  You understand the situation exactly.

CentOS 7 actually contains all the same components as CentOS 6 but in a
different form.  It would be theoretically possible to adapt those pieces
to work in the same manner as CentOS 6.  There would be drawbacks though
... like CentOS 7 is x86_64 only, so the client OS would no longer be able
to be built from the same OS as the server.


>
> 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.
>
>
KVM would be quite nice as the SPICE remote desktop protocol is
significantly better than X.  SPICE would handle remote USB, full screen
video and sound in a better way than X/ltspfs/pulseaudio had done in the
past.  It however has major drawbacks in memory overhead compared to the
old LTSP model, existing servers would be able to handle far fewer clients.

Warren Togami
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