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Re: [PLUG] Thin vs. Slim Clients?
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On Tue, 2002-08-06 at 09:43, W. Chris Shank wrote:
> from what i can tell, it boots only enough to get X
> running and then turns over control to X on the server.
Exactly right.
> What if the end user
> wants to listen to music, use the cd rom, or floppy disk?
It is possible to use NAS to redirect sound to the terminal. I've tried
it, and it works OK, but not great. There are a few different ways to
do cdrom/floppy access, and none of them are really great:
* NBD: doesn't support removable devices (yet)
* a small FTP server on the xterm: requires some additional work in the
applications to get running
* NFS exporting a cd/floppy??
The LTSP contrib page has a lot more about this:
http://www.ltsp.org/contrib/index.php
> Is
> there any way to get a better hybrid of LTSP and local fucntionality (sound,
> cd, floppy, etc).
LTSP has something called "Local Apps" support.
http://www.ltsp.org/documentation/ltsp-3.0.0/ltsp-3.0.html#AEN1378
As one might guess from the title, it allows some apps to be run locally
on the terminal. The nice thing is that it doesn't force *all* apps to
be run on the terminal. Its default configuration has the WM running on
the server, and if one wants to run an app locally, it calls a script
with an rsh command to the workstation. I imagine that it wouldn't be
too difficult to reverse this setup, where the WM and apps by default
run on the workstation, and only certain programs run on the server.
I've never messed with Local Apps, but I must say that you'd need a fast
term to use it. You're running big apps over NFS with no hard drive
space, so you are doing swap over NFS as well. You'd need a *lot* of
memory for each terminal. And even after that, you still need a lot of
CPU horsepower to get kde, mozilla or whatever running.
Michael F. Robbins
mike@gamerack.com
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