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Jim and Scott from LTSP

LTSP is thin clients with linux. Back in the days of the X terminals, some of you were around then, this is an open source X terminal. Started in 1999 so we've been around 6.5 years now, they had to solve a problem in Detroit where he is from. Shows a network card with bootrom for network boot. Just about any machine with built in networking will have this PXE build into it, that's a lot of old machines out there. Shows filesystem layout of the server which is mounted uses NFS and that's used as the filsystem. Different directories mounted for different architectures. DHCP, TFTP, and NFS servers all needed. SSH is included in breezy. All these come pre-configured in Ubuntu ready to go.

LTSP is considered to be a distribution because it includes a kernel and everything you need, difference is just that it sits on a server ready for TFTP load an NFS mount. That's not very good for distribution packaging. Matt Zimmerman did the first implementation of the new way of doing LTSP. That's making its way in Debian. Work is being done to get it in Fedora and SuSE as well. Meanwhile still working on core LTSP, things like local device access, thin client managing display. DBUS magic for plugable devices mounted using FUSE.

Swap over NBD. Minimum client is anything with a PCI bus and 32Megs of memory. But 32 Megs isn't a lot for graphics intenive things. LTSP just runs client and X server, but office and browsing means lots of images then the server runs out of memory and kills the X server.

Future includes wireless support, they get a lot of questions about that.

Brazil is a huge hotspot for LTSP, lists impressive numbers for internet cafes. Homeless people there don't have a street address but do have e-mail address thanks to cafes running LTSP. Croatia's second largest hospital runs LTSP and entrely open source.