[plug] Monday's presentation: prelude, precis, prizes, petitions

[Leon Brooks]

PRELUDE

This is a short blurb about Monday's presentation for those who have no idea 
what LTSP is... you can ask questions of me both at the meal before the 
presentation and often afterwards as well. Keep me supplied with hot 
chocolate and baklava/ladyfingers and I'll keep talking. (-:

Willing hands will be wanted before and after to help carry 5 boxes in and out 
from/to the van.

PRECIS

LTSP, the Linux Terminal Server Project, is a system for running many 
underpowered `thin client' workstations from one (or a few) more powerful 
servers. There are a couple of different ways of going about this, involving 
different hardware/performance balances, and two of them will be demonstrated 
simultaneously on the night.

You will also, Deo volente, see a Win4Lin session running Windows 98SE on a 
workstation. Win4Lin allows you to run Windows software in an isolated and 
cut-off-at-the-knees Windows session under Linux. Win4Lin is so efficient 
that in many cases the applications will run *faster* under Win4Lin under 
Linux than natively. If you Windows session dies (as they do), one click and 
five seconds later you're away again.

There is an at-first-glance unrelated Linux system called Mosix. Mosix allows 
a task which spawns child processes to be farmed out across servers. An 
example of this is rendering an animation using POVray: your main task spawns 
children to each render a frame. Each child is allocated to an unused 
processor so that the rendering happens in parallel.

Boring on the three machines you have at home, but consider a school, 
government offices, or big business which has hundreds or thousands of 
desktops. Mosix can run in the background, interfering very little if at all 
with day-to-day activities (in fact, there are now kernel patches for a 
super-niced mode which guarantees no direct interference with even background 
(niced) tasks). School equips 450 seats with Athlon 1.8's and viola, you now 
have 1.6 million BogoMIPs at your disposal.

It so happens that LTSP and Mosix integrate well. This will also be discussed 
in the presentation, but not demonstrated since all you would see is progress 
bars anyway. (-:

The overheads will be run from the nominal server, a massive dual PentiumPro 
200 with an awesome (as in awwww, can we have some more?) 96MB of 72-pin RAM 
and will talk to P100-P200 workstations with 32MB of RAM. It illustrates that 
monster servers aren't vital. Scale the performance for modern hardware as 
appropriate.

PRIZES

There will be some mystery prizes handed out at the beginning and end of the 
presentation.

PETITIONS

If you have some aspect of LTSP you want discussed, say so now and it'll have 
more chance of finding a place in the show.

Cheers; Leon