• Launchpad Entry: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/ltsp-fat-clients

• Created: 2006-06-21 by JonathanCarter

• Contributors: JonathanCarter

• Packages affected: ltsp-server, ltsp-server-standalone, dhcp3-server

Introduction

Summary

Ubuntu LTSP should provide a quick and effective method to install a diskless workstation that runs all applications locally from within the NFS exported chroot.

Rationale

LTSP cuts down on administration overhead, and has proven to be popular in education, and is becoming more popular in the commercial sector. LTSP does have limitations and complexities, for example, local devices (storage, peripherals, etc) are often complicated, and multimedia saturates network bandwidth quickly and becomes unusable.

Diskless Fat Clients would allow an administrator to use powerful workstations as diskless machines, maintaining the benefits of easy administration, while eliminating the current limitations that exists with current thin client implementations.

Use Cases

• A school uses new computers as diskless machines. Using P4 machines with 256MB RAM is wasteful as pure thin clients, and adds limitations on performance and multimedia.
• A scenario where you would want to easily migrate a Windows lab to dual boot to Ubuntu. Ubuntu could then be provided via LTSP, users could then simply boot locally for the legacy operating system.
• A company wants to implement PoS systems that would communicate via serial ports to petrol pumps, credit card machines, etc that would not be supported under traditional LTSP.
• A graphics studio using diskless machines for graphical intensive purposes.
• A university which runs CPU intensive tasks on workstations.
• A home user who wishes to do less admin on all his/her machines, and would like to have one central computer stored in a safe place and using the rest of the computers as workstations.

Scope

A successful implementation will provide a quick and easy method for administrators to deploy an Ubuntu fat client terminal server. This applies to all derivatives and Ubuntu based distributions.

Design

• Additional packages needs to be installed in the current default Ubuntu LTSP chroot, which includes, but are not limited to:  gdm, ubuntu-desktop 

Implementation

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

BoF Agenda and discussion

-- CategorySpec