Hello Community Recently there has been some concerns about the role of KIWI in LTSP5 implementation in openSUSE. I think it would be best if we discuss this openly with the community and furnish the clarifications to address misunderstandings about our work.
Let me start by explaining who is working on KIWI-LTSP. I have been working on getting LTSP5 on openSUSE using KIWI imaging technology, I am not employed by Novell or hold any official position with openSUSE, so whatever work that is done is done in my own time as a contribution to the community of the distribution I use. Important point to note is that *I cannot code*. Other team members include Magnus Boman, who is a Novell employee, he is helping me purely in his personal time (whatever little he can spare in his busy schedule). KIWI is a separate project lead by Marcus Schaefer, it is hosted here: http://kiwi.berlios.de/, it is the main tool that we use. KIWI is distribution independent, extremely sophisticated toolkit that is used to build system images of any kind, currently it supports Xen, VMX, Live CD, Live USB, Network Booting. It also supports various types of thin client technologies such as embedded TC used in Novell's enterprise products. It is also an engine that drives: http://studio.suse.com - a protal where everyone can create their own "OS" with few mouse clicks. Due to KIWI's capabilities it is natural for us to take full advantage of all the features it provides, some features that will never be available in LTSP's plugin system without someone coding it again. KIWI is the reason LTSP5 implementation on openSUSE has a lot of additional features such as providing LTSP prebuilt images through rpm, Live USB client that can be used with LTSP server running any Distribution, Live CD client and many more. Apart from the KIWI as a tool we use to create and configure image, all the core components of LTSP such as : LDM, LTSPFS/D, initscript, lts.conf, configure_x.sh, localapp support etc are *exactly as upstream without any patch specific to openSUSE*. The LTSP's plugin system has been presented as ready-to-use distribution independent way of building and configuring LTSP images, we appreciate the effort that has gone into it so have worked closely with upstream developers Ogra and VagrantC to implement fully functional openSUSE plugin. The shortcomings of the plugin system's "common code" or rather my own is, I cannot code, and cannot modify it to get it working on openSUSE, anyone suggesting that all the other distributions are able to work with it except us would be very misguided. A paid developer from Redhat has been working extremely hard to get it to work on Fedora since almost a year, it is still not at the feature parity of the implementation we had on openSUSE last year. Gentoo team is struggling to get it working since last many months too. Debian too did not have many features including NBD+squashfs+aufs until recently, so only distributions that had all the features of LTSP implementation using plugin system is Ubuntu. Imagine that all this effort will have to be repeated again to get LTSP implemented on new distro. I agree that if all the distributions used the plugin system it will benefit everyone, I do not have skills to work on it, hopefully one day some SUSE developer will take this up. Until then, to me as a non-developer KIWI is a perfect tool that allows me to do everything that is required from ltsp's plugin system and lot more with very little effort. So how are we making contribution to the LTSP? - We are introducing users of one of the top two distributions to this great way of computing: LTSP. We are trying to make use of LTSP popular. - We worked on Easy-LTSP - A truely distribution independent tool to easily configure lts.conf during this Google Summer of Code, surely it fills in a gap that has been there for a long time. - We provide easy to install rpm packages for LTSP via openSUSE Build Service, as a demonstration and a goodwill gesture we offered to build it for all distributions supported by oBS, a platform that could be immensely useful for upstream to provide builds of development snapshots while their "official" packages can go in the distribution's repo/media. - Easy to follow documentation(although not as good as edubuntu's) here: http://en.opensuse.org/LTSP - Some users of KIWI-LTSP already hang out in #ltsp and help with questions, not just on openSUSE but for other distributions too - There has been some suggestions(about LDM from lejo)/patches(gbolte's team for ltspfs) from kiwi-ltsp users too. My apologies for not being able to contribute upstream, hopefully it will be remedied in future by more active participation from SUSE devs. I am sure this helped clear some things up, if not, this is the place to discuss ask away any questions you may have :) Kind regards -J ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
