[plug] LTSP - Linux Terminal Server Project - LiveCD?

[Craig Ringer]

On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 23:32 +0800, Gavin Chester wrote:

> > I've come into a small town where the local community college is a
> > little under-funded and their hardware consists of 8 x Pentium 120
> > machines with 16Mb of RAM.
> 
> Sadly, they are of marginal use even as thin clients with only 16Mb of
> RAM.

Agreed. I really wouldn't want to use LTSP with a 16MB client - I had
stability issues with 16MB (deadlocks due to NFS swap, perhaps?) and
even 24MB is pretty horrid.

If they have S3 video cards, they'll also be pretty sluggish. Even a
P133 can be quite snappy with a TNT2 or GeForce4 MX, but with an S3 card
it'll be slooooow and sluggish.

> Reportedly it is possible if you activate NFS swap space to
> overcome the client RAM.  I hope that is the correct advice because I'm
> going from memory, so I suggest you search the K12LTSP mailing list
> archives where this aspect has been discussed many times. Basically,
> 16Mb is not enough for KDE or Gnome without swap.

I found Mozilla and OO.o to be the biggest culprits for X-server RAM
gobbling actually, though I suppose I was using IceWM and XFCE4 not
GNOME or KDE.

I'd strongly recommend that you check out XFCE4 for your users, as it'll
run much more snappily than GNOME. That said, GNOME 2.8 with xfwm4
instead of Metacity seems to do pretty well too, so long as you have the
server RAM for it (not as much as you might expect is required). I'm
really impressed with the improvements the Gtk folks have made in Gtk
for remote use lately. I would never want to use metacity for thin
clients, even in low resource mode, and actually find xfwm4 nicer even
for local use.

KDE 3.3 also runs pretty snappily - Trolltech have done some nice things
with Qt recently, and you can turn off almost all the eye-candy in KDE -
but I've found the users who've tried it just didn't like it and found
it hard to use.

Rox-filer is a good lightweight file manager, though not as nice as
nautilus. I'm operating very low end systems - slower than yours, though
with 32MB of RAM - with XFCE4, firefox, thunderbird, and ROX, and it
works rather nicely.

Much the same systems, but with better video cards (GeForce4 MX and TNT2
cards) are running GNOME OK, though I think a PII-233/64MB or similar
would help quite a bit for those.

> I presume they would
> have 72pin RAM chips - you could track some down from PC salvage outlets
> and then you would see better performance from those PCs as clients.

8MB modules can be had for almost nothing these days, if you can't
scrounge them for free. As for whether it's worth the time installing
them...

-- 
Craig Ringer