On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 06:08:19PM +0100, Russell Brown wrote: > For ages now we've been running low powered (256 or 512Mb RAM, Via CPU & > chipset) thin-clients booting LTSP 4.X that initiate an XDMP session > onto a fairly chunky multi-way Opteron Kubuntu Hardy based server. The > KDE 3.5 desktop was great for our purposes and it's all been working > fine. Many thanks to the LTSP team for all their fine work. > > > With Lucid LTS having had a while to settle and the impending 'death' of > KDE3.5 and Hardy, I thought I'd get up a spare server and start testing > the latest and greatest LTSP and Kubuntu in advance of moving our > systems over to it.... so that's what I've spent the last couple of > days doing and it's all become something of a nightmare :-( > > Sticking with LTSP 4.2 for the moment.. (it's faster to boot than LTSP5 > although I do like 5's idea and design); If I boot my thin clients > without glx modules in Xorg (ie with the the vesa driver) then the > desktop performance is truly dire and becomes unusable. > > If I boot them with the (Xorg detected) Via drivers and glx then Kde > crashes out just after showing the initial desktop and panel. The > .xsession-errors file is some 38K long! but the point of failure seems > to be "kdeinit4: Fatal IO error: client killed". > > I've started off with kubuntu-10.04-alternate-i386.iso and upgraded via > apt to the latest versions of everything; I've even added the > kubuntu-ppa and installed KDE 4.4.5 but there's no difference. > > FWIW, using a Gnome session on the same server and thin-client works > fine as does Xfce4 (although with glx, compositing turned on and shadows > and transparency it's not a snappy as without but proves the point that > Xorg/glx in itself isn't the problem) so I don't think it's the > thin-client(s) or LTSP that's the problem but something in > KDE4/plasma/etc; I'm just asking here in the hope that others have been > down the same path and found a solution. > > So..... am I flogging a dead horse trying to use KDE4 on modest > hardware? Has anyone else got a similar setup working? Any suggestions > on where to go from here? > > Perhaps KDE4 is just too heavy on the graphics for any non-local X > display... but I hope someone will tell me otherwise. > > Oh.... using LTSP5; Xorg dies (using SCREEN_07 = xdmcp) as soon as it > tries starting the KDE4 session :-( but works fine with Gnome. > I have very little experience with KDE4. I have tried it briefly in a virtual machine running Debian Squeeze, and it seems reasonably quick. (To be fair, I only opened a handful of applications, but it wasn't laggy).
So I'd recommend you give Debian Squeeze a try, just to see if its performance is any different than Kubuntu. In general I find that Debian is a little more "old hardware friendly" than Ubuntu. Alternatively, you could try another KDE-like desktop. You can make Gnome have a KDE-like menu at the bottom of the screen. Alternatively you could try LXDE (very lightweight), FVWM-Crystal, IceWM, or one of the many others out there. Personally I'd recommend giving LXDE a try. Or you could try to fix the problems you're having with Kubuntu, but I don't have any advice for you there. Maybe somebody else can help with that. -Rob ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Sprint What will you do first with EVO, the first 4G phone? Visit sprint.com/first -- http://p.sf.net/sfu/sprint-com-first _____________________________________________________________________ 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
