Some more details about LTSP

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, S. J. van Harmelen wrote:

> 1) Booting with PXE you get some files from the tftpserver to start your
> thinclient with. I guess a vmlinux and a initrd.
> 2) While booting some scripts in the initrd mount / to the i386.img on
> the server and the rest is loaded from there.

3) When the thin client boots up it starts a set of services which by
   default includes ldm -- the login screen.  

4) When the user logs in, ldm connects to the server over an encypted
   channel.  From then on every application (GNOME, OpenOffice, Firefox,
   ....) runs on the server, but displays on the client.  None of these
   applications run on the client.

So, without the server, there would be no applications without the server.
Unless of course you are deviating from the norm and running local apps on
the thin client which is supposed to be supported under gutsy, though is
not the the standard track.

> As far as I understand, you then have a completely independent client
> running except for the fact that your / is mounted to a image somewhere
> else. 

Not really, no.  Except perhaps with local apps.

> But if you would extract the i386.img file to a local disk and
> adjusted some start-up scripts in the initrd you could (theoretically)
> boot the same client locally. Right (not that I want this btw, but just
> making sure I understand correctly)?

Maybe with local apps.  

> My goal with LTSP is to build a rdesktop or Citrix client with local
> device support (including printers). And since the needed rdesktop
> scripts are already put in by Edubuntu, I will start with getting
> rdesktop working.

rdesktop is an example of a local running application.  So, rdesktop does
run on the thin client.  The web kiosk also does this.  However, the normal
thin client mode runs programs on the server. 

Gavin