On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Simon Ruiz wrote:
> Anyhow, these workstations are far too beefy to be LTSP clients (that is,
> it'd be a waste to use them as such), so they all run as desktops. Last
> year I used Edubuntu on the first batch of computers, and this year as
> I'm redesigning the system we're using I've honestly started using plain
> vanilla Ubuntu.
> So, any ideas? How can I be useful to Edubuntu? Or should I just stick
> with vanilla Ubuntu?
There is such a thing as diskless clients which run all of their own
applications. This might suit your requirements well. The idea being that
you provide a PXE boot image and then an NFS shares with home dir and
system image. Then the desktops do all the work. This might work well for
you because:
- it'll make use of all of your good cpus
- adding new machines involves zero install, you just plug them in and PXE
boot them
- client disk failures are not an issue
- installation of software is only done in one place
- home directories are stored centrally (although that's easy enough to
arrange with nfs anyway)
- you get much better performance on video, sound, etc. as the data
doesn't have to stream across the network
I don't think edubuntu supports this mode of operation at the minute, but
I imagine it could. One implementation is called lessdisks, LTSP has
something called LOCAL_APPS, though I'm not sure exactly what that does.
If that would be your ideal Edubuntu setup, maybe you could propose working
on a project to implement that. I'm only another user of course, it's
possible the Edubuntu people will think this a horrible idea.
Gavin
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