Distributions

A look at the Linux Terminal Server Project

Since the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) came away with the Best of Show award at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo (LWCE) last week, we thought this would be a good time to take a look at the project and its status. Jim McQuillan of LTSP talked to us about the project and gave some insight into where it's going. What is LTSP? Basically, it's a package for Linux that allows low-powered thin clients to run off of a Linux server.

According to McQuillan, the project was launched in August of 1999. LTSP originated out of a project that began in 1996, to provide a solution for Binson's Hospital Supplies (BHS) that would allow access to an AS/400 for legacy applications and Unix for new applications from a single computer or terminal on each desktop. After several false starts with dumb terminals and Windows PCs, diskless Linux workstations proved to be the best solution for BHS.

Basically, LTSP is a distribution of Linux that sits on the server and is loaded by a thin client over a network using Etherboot or the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE). It sends a TFTP request for the kernel, and once the kernel is in memory, the client does an NFS mount of the filesystem on the LTSP server and a "pivot root" so that the NFS filesystem becomes the root filesystem. Then the LTSP client launches an X server to get a login back to the LTSP server. McQuillan noted that "we didn't invent this technology, it's been around for years. We just glued it together" and made it easier for people to use.

There are some vital differences between LTSP and traditional "dumb terminals" that only display applications. With dumb terminals, all processing takes place on the server. LTSP, on the other hand, makes it possible to run some applications on the server and some applications locally, so that users can run applications that might not work well running over the network or that would place a heavy load on the server. McQuillan cited Firefox as an application that would be good to run locally, or VoIP applications, which the LTSP team demonstrated at LWCE.

LTSP also makes it possible to reuse older hardware that might not be suitable for running current versions of Linux or Windows. McQuillan said that LTSP would run fine on "anything with a PCI bus and 16 MB of RAM". It also allows organizations to reduce support costs by centralizing applications and by using thin clients without hard disks -- thereby eliminating "moving parts" that fail often, and by centralizing storage.

There are a few applications that aren't suitable for LTSP. For example, McQuillan was quick to say that LTSP wasn't really appropriate for gaming. "Trying to run Quake across the network is not a pleasant experience." Other rich multimedia, such as video editing, is pretty much out as well. Also, McQuillan said that if Linux itself didn't fit well for a specific use, then LTSP was pretty much out there as well.

McQuillan said that the project does scale pretty well. The largest deployment he's worked on, the BHS deployment, runs 140 LTSP clients off of one server. He said he's also heard of setups consisting of 400 clients on a quad Opteron server.

There are some limitations for the project. McQuillan told LWN that device support is "not as robust as we'd like", but that the project is working on making things work little better. "We want you to be able to plug in a USB device and instantly, a device icon appears on the desktop...that's where we have to be".

The project is also working to make it easier to lock down the desktops so that administrators can more easily control what applications users have access to. He noted that GNOME and KDE may not be a good fit for larger environments with 50 to 100 users, because they're "fairly heavy". In those environments, McQuillan said that IceWM and XFce were good choices for lightweight window managers.

Another hurdle for LTSP is the fact that it doesn't always fit well into a distribution. Right now, LTSP provides all the "bits" that make up the thin client distribution -- glibc, the kernel, etc. However, they're working on "Project MueKow" (pronounced "moo-cow"), which will use distribution packages as much as possible rather than providing all of the bits directly. The name is a play on Microsoft's "Longhorn."

This will be showing up first in the next Ubuntu release, Breezy Badger. McQuillan said that four developers, two from LTSP and two from the K12LTSP project, went to Sydney in April to "help figure out how to integrate LTSP into Ubuntu". However, he also noted that he's eager to work with all of the distributions, not just Ubuntu.

While attending LWCE, this writer had a chance to spend some time talking to some of the other LTSP team members and looking at the technology. When using a LTSP client, there really isn't a great deal of difference between using a workstation with a local Linux installation and using LTSP.

Overall, LTSP looks like a great solution for organizations that want to save money on PCs and support costs. We're looking forward to seeing it included in Ubuntu and other distributions, which will no doubt help spread LTSP even further.

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BLAG30001 Released

BLAG Linux and GNU has released BLAG30001 (lederhosen). BLAG30001 is based on Fedora Core 3 plus updates, and additional applications from Dag, Freshrpms, NewRPMS, and includes custom packages. "BLAG30001 is the first update to the BLAG30k series. Updates include a new kernel, gaim, gimp, openssl, perl, php, spamassassin, thunderbird, cups, cpp, httpd (apache), openssh, vim, wireless-tools, yum, zlib, bittorrent, graveman, kismet, amule, mplayer, xine, firefox, mozilla, tor and parted. New packages are gtk-gnutella & nicotine. Overall, 139 packages were updated on the CD (16% of the total)."

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Distro Development Talk

Distro Development Talk is a new forum for the discussion of Linux distribution development issues. The goal is to have a site that describes solutions to common distribution problems and share information between distributions. Click below for the full announcement.

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Debian 12 Years Old (DebianPlanet)

DebianPlanet notes that the Debian Project turned twelve years old this week and it is available on twelve different architectures.

To celebrate DebianPlanet has started a retrospective of some of the important and interesting things that have happened in the Debian community in the last year.

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The Debian Project receives funding

The Debian project has announced that it will received funding from the LinuxFund. The Linux-oriented credit card organization will be disbursing $6,000 in total, $500 per month for one year.

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First Annual Bangalore Debian Developer Conference

The Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore is organizing a one day Debian Conference on 20th August, 2005. The conference is mainly to create a platform for Debian Developers in India and create an environment for more contributions to Debian Project from India.

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Debian GNU/Linux announcements

The Debian project adds security support for stable amd64. "This port is not yet part of the Debian archive, but it will be included in unstable/testing soon and users already benefit from security updates distributed via security.debian.org."

This is a call for sponsors to donate locations, work and money for debian developer gatherings. Debian developers have found that small gatherings are highly effective for problem solving, especially those that require group discussion and focused cooperation. "Debian should have many such gatherings whenever they are needed. In order to have more of them help from sponsors would be welcome. Gatherings in planning that i know of are debian-qa, debian-java, debian-installer and debian-edu."

Here's an announcement clarifying the policy for the expulsion of Debian Developers.

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The return of archive.debian.org (DebianPlanet)

DebianPlanet reports that archive.debian.org is back online, thanks to Phil Hands.

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Unofficial Fedora FAQ Update

The Unofficial Fedora FAQ has been updated. There are many minor updates plus a method of installing FC4 using floppies, and several new translations.

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Debian Weekly News

The Debian Weekly News for August 16, 2005 is out. Topics this week include Debian's twelfth birthday on August 16, the Bangalore Debian Developer Conference, the policy for removing packages from testing, a renaming of kernel source packages, bug handling, security support for AMD64, the policy for the expulsion of Debian developers, LinuxFund funding, the Debian women subproject, sponsors needed for developer meetings, and more.

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Fedora Weekly News

The Fedora Weekly News #8 looks at the Fedora Project booth at LinuxWorld San Franicsco, Auditd Initscript Reports Errors, Mozilla Foundation Forms New Organization, Mozilla 1.7.11 Released, mplayerplug-in 3.05 Released, Test de Fedora Core 4 and more.

Fedora Weekly News #9 is also available. This issue covers the availability of Fedora Core 4 with Global File System, Fedora in LinuxWorld San Francisco 2005, LinuxWorld Expo Blogs and Stories, the launch of Fedora Foundation delayed, Fedoraproject.org needs to be revamped, and several other topics.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of August 15, 2005 is out. This edition covers the release of Gentoo Linux 2005.1, the first US Gentoo developer conference webcast from San Francisco, and more.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 113

The DistroWatch Weekly for August 15, 2005 is out. "We shall start with a quick look at the first alpha release of the Gentoo Installer project - the first Gentoo live CD which boots into a full GNOME desktop and which can be installed to a hard disk with -- believe it or not -- a mouse! Then we'll talk briefly about the first beta release of SUSE Linux 10.0 and introduce two web sites specialising in bringing you news and information about the many live CD projects available today. Our featured distributions of the week is BLAG Linux And GNU, a single CD Fedora-based distribution with a home entertainment bias."

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Fedora updates

Fedora Core 4 updates: system-config-bind (bug fixes), system-config-netboot (bug fixes), lam (bug fix), evolution-data-server (fix crash in the LDAP backend), audit (fix several problems), mc (update to 4.6.1), kdepim (fix kmail bug).

Fedora Core 3 updates: system-config-bind (bug fixes), system-config-netboot (bug fixes), lam (bug fix), mc (update to 4.6.1), system-config-netboot (bug fixes), koffice (update to 1.4.1), and a KDE update to 3.4.2 including kdeaddons, kdeadmin, kdeartwork, kdebindings, kdebase, kdeedu, kdegames, kdegraphics, kde-il8n, kdelibs, kdemultimedia, kdenetwork, kdepim, kdesdk, kdetoys, kdeutils, kdevelop, kdewebdev, arts, arts.

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Mandriva Linux updates

Mandriva Linux has an rpmdrake update for 10.0, 10.1, Corporate 3.0 and Corporate Server 2.1. "Due to the changeover of the Mandriva domain names and the unavailability of the old Mandrake Linux domains, rpmdrake needed an update in order to update the mirrors list file."

This ghostscript update fixes Ghostscript 8.15 on 64bit platforms, which can crash and dump core processing on carefully crafted .pdf files.

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Trustix TSL-2005-0041

Trustix has fixed bugs in several packages, including apache, cgilib, curl, kernel, libart, mod_auth_mysql, mod_auth_pgsql, mod_authz_ldap, open, php, rrdtool, vlock and webalizer, for TSL 2.2 & 3.0.

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Austrumi 0.9.7 Released (TuxMachines.org)

TuxMachines reviews Austrumi 0.9.7. "In case you didn't know, Austrumi is a business card size (50MB) bootable Live CD Linux distribution based on 'Slackware GNU Linux' using'Blin' initialisation scripts. I looked at version 0.9.5 back in May and found it to be a great little mini distro. At that time it had wonderful fonts and amazing speed to add enjoyment to using the many apps included in that teny tiny 48mb. Version 0.9.7 was released a coupla days ago and I wanted to see what was new."

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Review: Xandros Desktop 3.0 Business Edition (NewsForge)

NewsForge features a review of Xandros Desktop 3.0 Business Edition by Jem Matzan. "Last summer I reviewed Xandros Business Edition 2.5 and found that it generally wasn't ready to compete with existing, established corporate desktops. It suffered from an old kernel, malfunctioning sound drivers, a high pricetag, the inability to perform unattended or remote installations, and a bug in the desktop environment that annoyed me. In the current version, Xandros has remedied all of these negative points."

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