Converting standard LTSP to Edubuntu

[Jonathan Carter]

Hi Jan

Jan Wilson wrote:
> Is there a document somewhere giving the details of the differences
> between LTSP 3.0 and Edubuntu LTSP 5.10?  That would've been very
> helpful.  I'd be happy to HELP write it ... though I have experience
> with LTSP I certainly wouldn't call myself a guru.

Wow, LTSP.org 3.0 is ancient!

> A few quick tip, for anyone trying to make the shift.  Using any part of
> the previous LTSP installation seems not only to make it more difficult,
> but nearly impossible.  What I wound up doing was renaming all the
> directories that had to do with LTSP, and (re)installing
> ltsp-server-standalone.  Apparently the ltsp-build-client script was
> detecting the existing LTSP installation and skipping a bunch of stuff.

I think you should really remove (or at least rename to another
location) the current LTSP.org if you have it installed, before
installing ULTSP (as I call it these days).

> I realize all this stuff is in flux, but it really would be nice to have
> some basic documentation for it.  I'm willing to help, and now that I
> have a working setup I can experiment.

I'm speaking under correction. Matt / Oliver, please correct and add...

Some basic differences:

LTSP.org:
* Installed from tarball
* Uses XDMCP for remote X session
* Has sound and limited local device support
* Hard work to maintain from developer point of view, uses LTSP build
environment
* More work to upgrade for user, LTSP.org is usually upgraded by
extracting new tarballs
* Supports swap over NFS
* Local USB, serial and parrallel printing support

ULTSP:
* Installed from Ubuntu .debs using APT
* Uses ssh for remote X session (much more secure, better compression
and encryption (i think) )
* Has nearly no sound or local device support
* Changes in upstream Ubuntu directly impacts ULTSP, changes are easy.
* Upgrades happen through APT, and make LTSP easy to maintain.
* Not quite sure if it supports swap over NFS yet, seems that it will
support swap over NBD (more efficient, once again)
* Printing support?

Matt involved the LTSP.org team in creating ULTSP, and I think I read
somewhere that he's working on getting the Ubuntu LTSP into Debian as
well. Various sources also said that it's going to be used in Fedora and
SUSE. I wonder if that means it's going to be an Ubuntu based LTSP
chroot? Or will it be a very clever script that uses the RPM's somehow
(perhaps with apt4rpm?).

So LTSP.org has some very little extra functionality, which might be
crucial to some people. The Ubuntu LTSP is easier to develop on, I
think. And I think the rate at which it will grow and expand in terms of
features will be faster. Oliver talked about some fancy Gstreamer
hackery in Dapper, which will certainly make my life easier. I think
Dapper will also have local device support, and with APT on the thin
client systems, and since it already uses ssh, implementing local device
support should also be easy.

I'm personally very excited about Matt's LTSP implementation. With one
experiment I apt-getted an entire Ubuntu system in the LTSP environment,
and used it for a diskless fat client system. I think I saw a spec that
said that in Dapper Edubuntu will have LDAP support, which will make the
authentication side of that much easier.

-Jonathan