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

[Michael Hunt]

Isn't the presentation on Tuesday ????

Have I missed a change in PLUG days ????

Michael Hunt

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Leon Brooks [mailto:leon at brooks.fdns.net]
> Sent: Sunday, 11 August 2002 12:28 PM
> To: Perth Linux User Group
> Subject: [plug] Monday's presentation: prelude, precis, prizes,
> petitions
>
>
> 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
>