After 2 Years of Development, LTSP 5.2 Is Out 79
The Linux Terminal Server Project has for years been simplifying the task of time-sharing a Linux system by means of X terminals (including repurposed low-end PCs). Now, stgraber writes "After almost two years or work and 994 commits later made by only 14 contributors, the LTSP team is proud to announce that the Linux Terminal Server Project released LTSP 5.2 on Wednesday the 17th of February. As the LTSP team wanted this release to be some kind of a reference point in LTSP's history, LDM (LTSP Display Manager) 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 were released on the same day. Packages for LTSP 5.2, LDM 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 are already in Ubuntu Lucid and a backport for Karmic is available. For other distributions, packages should be available very soon. And the upstream code is, as always, available on Launchpad."
Excellent news (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I don't see what the big deal is (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I don't see what the big deal is (Score:2, Informative)
LTSP isn't some X11 extension. It's a distro that sets up a server, and supports a large number of diskless thin clients, with lots of features like running apps locally, accessing local disks, etc., etc.
Running X11 apps over SSH has NO RELATION TO WHAT LTSP DOES.
It really is cool (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, you can do it without LTSP. But you don't have to be a guru to stand up an LTSP server and host desktops for thin clients so it's handy for the schools who use it. I've been using it at home for years to host desktops for guests because when the nieces and nephews come over they have incredible computer corrupting skills and need a platform that's less amenable to viruses than my kids' desktops and laptops.
You can also mangle the config to merge in DRBL, which allows me to netboot compute cluster nodes that I get at surplus if I want to do a little recreational number crunching or transcoding. I think it's pretty cool that we live in an age when an ordinary elementary school can have its own supercomputer and if their networking is up to snuff, join the ranks of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
But go ahead and rain on their parade if it makes you feel 1337.
Re:I don't see what the big deal is (Score:4, Informative)
LTSP isn't some X11 extension. It's a distro that sets up a server,
Sigh. LTSP is a system mostly utilizing existing servers that provides XDMCP over SSH, and the rest of your comment is true. But it's not a Linux distribution; it's software for Linux. And while it does have a lightweight login server, the really interesting parts are the ability to use local machine resources (as you say, disks and other USB devices) and that it sets up the netboot configuration[s] for you.
5.2 is a bugfix release for 5.199 and as compared to 5.0 most of the improvements are in speed and so-called 'fat client' support, where most apps are actually run on the client. There have also been tweaks to the way audio is handled.
Re:Only 994 commits in 2 years by 14 people? (Score:2, Informative)
It is if they're also teaching school. A lot of open source projects are funded by enterprises that pay programmers to improve the project and contribute back. There isn't a lot of call for that in LTSP yet - corporations find it easier to just license Citrix or Microsoft Terminal Services.
This may change as VDI initiatives take off for the power savings, security benefits and management economy. Terminal services on low-watt thin clients is hugely green. LTSP for terminal services, virtual desktops in KVM, plus dedicated servers for high-powered users makes a nice blended VDI solution that suits low-needs customer service people who only need a browser, all the way up to engineers - as long as everybody can use Linux. Management overhead is very low and security can be as high as you can get with network access terminals.
Re:Only 994 commits in 2 years by 14 people? (Score:3, Informative)
LTSP is supported by Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora/RedHat, Suse.
On another level, another important effort has been done to provide enterprise grade thin client (LTSP-Cluster [ltsp-cluster.org]) and all those efforts happens outside the LTSP tree and are not accounted for in this changelog.
Re:I don't see what the big deal is (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't see what the big deal is (Score:5, Informative)
But do you have sound working? Can you plug in a usb drive on your client and see it on your desktop? Yes you can do all that, but you also need to manage it, and LTSP supports installations of as large as 30,000 desktop clients.
The point is to have a thin client work like a desktop.When it works it is a huge time saver for admins, as you have one server cluster to back up and maintain, and a bunch of diskless workstations that can be unplugged and replaced with no configuration or installation beyond maybe needing to put the mac address in dhcpd.conf
LTSP is probably more work than it's worth if you have less than five work stations, but more than five workstations, and the long term savings probably make it worth the initial time investment, as you need beefy servers and good redundancies, but after you have a high availability server cluster that people are logging into, management as become a lot easier.
Re:I don't see what the big deal is (Score:4, Informative)
You don't do exactly what the project says it does. The project uses diskless system with no ROM OS to boot to a full X session or RDP session. Jim McQuillan basically wrote a system to duplicte what he was doing for hospitals at the time. When I used LTSP often (from 0.9 to 4.0, circa 2000-2004), the process worked like this:
I'd also like to give a big shout out to Eric Harrison, who made the whole system easy to use for schools with K12LTSP (now K12Linux [fedorahosted.org]).
Re:Only 994 commits in 2 years by 14 people? (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, but it's you that doesn't know what he's talking about, since you're too "time share" phobic to find out what's really going on.
Give me an enterprise-class machine (disk access, etc., though two machines would be better) of he same caliber as a high-end desktop from today, and I can run 15-20 cheap diskless clients off of it in a Gbit, switched environment, with the same performance of a low-end desktop from today. 3D accelleration. All the desktop apps. Local storage and printer access. How does that work? The performance comes from shared application libraries among different clients and cached memory on the server.
Yeah, I've done this in production environment. I've done it in my business. I'm not a jobless troll. It works. It saves a ton of money. Users have no idea anything's different than a standard desktop, except that booting is five times faster, and when hardware fails, I can rip a client out, put a new one in, and have the client back up and running in 5 minutes. I fix the broken client on my schedule instead of holding up work for it.
Stop being afraid and learn some new tech.
Re:are there a windows client available? (Score:2, Informative)
You can use LTSP to boot directly from bare metal to an RDP login. Does that count?