LTSP Advice

[Becker, Rob]

I have an LTSP setup running at home.
It's pretty cool stuff.
At this point, I am running over a 10M hub to a bunch of pentium
100's-133's.  I only have two or three clients up at any given time, but
my server is only a 750M Duron with 384M of RAM and a 20G IDE drive.
LTSP can work on laptops as well, I have tested it and had no problems
with a few Pentium laptops connecting to a PII-233 laptop.  I am fairly
familiar with the process of installing and building out an LTSP
network.  I am however a little behind on versions.  I have not worked
much with LTSP 4 (I think that is the latest).  As far as network
connectivity goes, you could do it wirelessly, but it is probably not
the best choice.  If I were trying wireless, I would make sure to do so
with 802.11 G in as perfect an environment as I could.  I would also
build out the server with multiple wireless cards and not share
bandwidth on just one.  This whole setup would likely get a bit tricky,
but I'm pretty sure it could be done.  LTSP is one of the coolest
technologies out there in my opinion.  It allows for a very robust
environment that is simple to manage.  I love being able to just patch
and maintain one server and get 3 free workstations to boot.  I also
love that I can provide word processing, internet browsing, email and
instant message along with a few games to my siblings for next to no
cost on machines that other people have just given me.  If your friend
is interested in looking into this further, I would love to help.
Please keep us posted on the list as to your progress.
Thanks.
Rob

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Herrmann [mailto:kclug at ItDepends.com] 
Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2004 11:02 PM
To: kclug
Subject: LTSP Advice

I have a friend who owns a small business.  He is remodeling the 
workspace he and his employees use and he'd like to really modernize in 
the process.  The things he and his employees need are very well covered

by linux, and he is seriously considering it.  The main application they

use runs on a unix server, which they access through a terminal 
interface.  Definitely no problem there.  They also need mail, a shared 
calendar, a spreadsheet, a little bit of publishing, and they use 
Quicken a little.  I can show him Linux equivalents and Cross-Over 
Office, and let him choose what he thinks will work best for them.

Here's the thing that sounded appealing to him, then he took it a little

farther.  I told him about running everything on a server and just have 
some simple X terminals on each person's workstation.  I'm starting to 
look at ltsp.org, but thought I would see if any of you guys had any 
experience you could share.  The other thing he thought would be great 
would be if these terminals could all be wireless, including the 
printers.  Then the only wires that would be required in the office 
would be power.  That would be cool, but I'm not sure if the technology 
is there yet.

Opinions?

Thanks,
Jim