Fedora Project Considering "Stateless Linux"

Havoc Pennington writes "Red Hat developers have been working on a generic framework covering all cases of sharing a single operating system install between multiple physical or virtual computers. This covers mounting the root filesystem diskless, keeping a read-only copy of it cached on a local disk, or storing it on a live CD, among other cases. Because OS configuration state is shared rather than local, the project is called 'stateless Linux.' The post to fedora-devel-list is here, and a PDF overview is here."

On behalf of non-geeks, let me be the first to...

[Anonymous Coward]

On behalf of non-geeks, let me be the first to say... HUH?

I mean, I know the words. It's mostly English, and that's my first language, and I'm pretty handy with computers, but that was the most incomprehensible load of babble I've heard since the last time I watched TNG.

Can someone explain what this means, in plain English, to a regular user (i.e. non-hacker geek types)?

Re:LTSP

[savagedome]

I imagine. Single configuration, one update, all the "personal files" in a server somewhere -- makes for easy updating and backing up. Also keeps hardware requirements down

Welcome to the world of 'dumb terminals' again. Thanks for playing this long!

Re:Looks neat but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see the purpose. Maybe I'm just unitiated, [...]

On first pass, that said "urinated". On second pass, it said "uninitiated". Third and subsequent passes have failed.

Re:What's wrong with flexibility?

[radish]

For example, if you asked me a week ago the origin of chopsticks I (like most people) would have responded China, or parts nearby.

And you'd have been correct.

Now this totally neglects the less-than-common knowledge that they were actually created in America in the 1800s by immigrants to mining communities as a means of differentiating their restaurants from more common fare

Crap. Chopsticks have been in use in China and Japan for around 5000 years. This page [calacademy.org] includes a brief history, and you can get more details here [about.com]. Note that the second article points out that a museum in Shanghi actually has a pair from the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907). There's also more nice information on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].

THEY WERE INVENTED IN CHINA DUMBASS

[Anonymous Coward]

before 1000 BC.

Answer to the SCO issue

[davejenkins]

Bingo! If the kernel is in some remote location (i.e. Cayman Islands), then enterprises can run all their apps locally, but SCO cannot sue them for copyright violation (because the code is offshore)!

Sure, ping times will be a bitch, but... /just kidding

Re:On behalf of non-geeks, let me be the first to.

[SlowMovingTarget]

Very simple, it is stateless so it remembers nothing from command to command. Here's what it would look like to use it:

username: smt
password:
smt-home> ls -al
.
..
.bash_profile
.bash_rc

username: smt
password:
smt-home> . /usr/local/bin/giant-freaking-script.sh
job complete...

username: smt
...

I for one plan to skip this distro.