Rob Owens wrote: > On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 02:45:10PM -0600, Scott Balneaves wrote: >> On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 12:48:15PM -0500, Rob Owens wrote: >> >> <snip> >> >>> ... On the other cards, I was given a terrible screen resolution (800x600 >>> or less on my 18" lcd). >> And this backs up my point, to a certain extent. >> >> When I started using LTSP back in late 1999, 800x600 was the "good" >> resolution, >> 640x480 was the "terrible one", and 1024x768 was the "OMG go out and buy a >> $500 >> video card and that super-special NEC Multisync monitor" "just out of your >> price range" one. >> >> So, the hardware that would have been considered "good" back then, is now >> considered "terrible", partly due to our own expectations, and partly due to >> the fact that it's getting darned near impossible to function on anything >> LESS >> than 1280x1024 since there's so much visual goo on the screen. >> >> The other point was brought up that X.org itself is fogetting it's "remote >> display" roots, and going for the bling. >> >> Certainly, us LTSP developers are pretty cognizant of the lower end boxes. >> Myself and Jim know a lot of people in Brazil who don't have access to >> anything >> else, vagrantc works with FreeGeek, and they have LOTS of older hardware, and >> Gadi makes a business out of selling nice, small little boxes. >> >> However, the people who make the bits we USE, like Xorg, the kernel, etc. >> aren't really thinking about us anymore. The rush to finally realize "the >> year >> of the linux desktop" and match Windows/Mac "bling for bling" is putting less >> of a premium on nice, small, and tight code, and more on getting super-sexy >> speedy features in quickly. >> >> That having been said, I still think LTSP's doing better than most. I'm >> sitting here on my 1ghz, 256 meg workstation, which, if it were running full >> Linux would be pokey or (heaven forfend) Vista, would be unusable, and as a >> thin client, it's fine. >> >> We might be able to come up with a scaled back kernel for each distro, and a >> "hand crafted" set of udev rules, but in the long run, it's a bit of a losing >> battle. >> > So what about my idea of utilizing the lightweight distros for the chroot? > If somebody can give me some guidelines about how it would work, and what > the distro maintainers would need to do, I'll start joining their mailing > lists. I've got no job for the next 2 weeks -- I'll get right to work on this > if the LTSP developers think it's a feasible idea.
2 weeks? That's just enough time to start thinking about it. To actually integrate LTSP into a distro, such as Damn Small Linux (DSL) will take months and months. In addition, there's almost certainly changes that will need to be made to some of the distro packages to make them behave properly in a network-booted environment. What we've found is that it really helps if one of the developers from the distro gets onboard to make this happen. That's the way it has worked so far. You could cobble something together using some DSL bits, but if you don't actually use their packages and package management system, it'll be nearly impossible to keep up with security updates and bug fixes that the distro already handles. Jim McQuillan j...@ltsp.org > > Damn Small Linux claims it'll run on a 486dx with 16mb RAM -- with X. > Recommended specs are a Pentium 200 MHz with 64mb RAM. There's also DSL-N, > which is apparently Damn Small Linux with a more modern kernel. It's > minimum requirements are the same as the recommended specs above. In any > case, this seems like the kind of thing we could use to run low-power thin > clients. > > -Rob > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA > -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise > -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation > -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD > http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H > _____________________________________________________________________ > 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _____________________________________________________________________ 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
