Bugzilla – Bug 216753
LTSP not supported natively
Last modified: 2008-01-22 17:31:38 UTC
This product is becoming an invaluable resource to many school district's and business's throughout the world, As most school district don't have a 13 year veteran of networking on staff. it is very difficult to install this. so they move to K12 ltsp. This eliminates the posibility of providing the users with the NCL or many of the other benifiets of Novell's product line. With the new definition of LTSP5 moving directly into Ubunto, Debain, and Fedora Novell\SUSE need to move QUICKLY to rectify this ommision in order to continue to gain desktop markert share. I have writen instructions to manually add LTSP 4.2up4 to SLED so it is possible to get it working. http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/17942.html Please assign someone to help build the MueKow modules for SUSE. Please refer to internal bug 63799 for more details. I have spoken to Dave Brower, Jeff Jaffe and many others who have assured me that this is in consideration. James
muekow = ltsp5
This producs (in previous update) = LTSP, more info about ltsp at http://www.ltsp.org More info about ltsp5 is at: http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/MueKow Another problem with the current ltsp (< version 5) is that it is difficult to get applications running on the thin client itself. Those so called local applications, require e.g. lots of video processing like google earth (GE), multi media (MM) applications (sound should be in sync with video) and VOIP applications. The 1st 2 (GE and MM) are very often used in schools nowadays. Ltsp 5 makes it possible to install the applications from the distribution in the ltsp tree (/opt/ltsp). Ltsp 5 is a big step forwards and it would be great if opensuse-10.3 good be equipped with this service!
There is another oppertunity to work together with the core team. It starts friday 2 November, so be quick ;) If possible with the upcoming 10.2 release.... MOre info in the irc log below: jammcq: is it possible for you to tell me with whom you have spoken to at Novell? brich 22:23:38 [buddy] jammcq: he (fxrsliberty) talked to several people. Dave Brower is the head of k12 marketing and he wants it. jeff jaffe an I exchanged a few e-mails and he forwarded me to Guy Lunardi Jeff Jaffe is COO or a function very close to that level.... jammcq 22:25:46 [buddy] hey guys I talked with Matt French he seemed "interested" but unwilling to commit any resources after we had our hackfest in september, he seemed even more interested. so, I invited him to send someone to our next hackfest which is this coming friday and saturday, but I got no reply so basically, I'm happy to extend invitations for them to come play with us, but i'm not going to chase them if they aren't really willing to play brich 22:33:26 [buddy] Where is the hackfest, do you have some more info? jammcq 22:33:46 [buddy] san francisco, fishermans wharf area 9 of us getting together for 2 days starts 9am on friday, and ends at 4:30pm on saturday if you find a novell guy that wants to come, have him contact me but my understanding is that the "real" novell engineers are in germany brich 22:35:11 [buddy] I'll add it to the my feature (bug) request. fxrsliberty: can you do the same to your bug report. I think it is late indeed for a request. Perhaps a conference call via skype with webcam might work? jammcq 22:36:32 [buddy] well, at this point, we've got 2 VERY busy days, i'm not interested in jumping through hoops just because they couldn't make up their minds brich 22:36:50 [buddy] clear! jammcq 22:37:04 [buddy] I tried to explain to these guys that it's an opportunity to work with the ubuntu and fedora and LTSP guys who are making things happen face-to-face it doesn't get much better than that
yes,. LTSP support needs to be improved, unlikely to happend for 10.2 though. Aj: Does people at novell will work on this area for SLEPOS ( I guess POS will use something like this no ??
Cristian, LTSP and SLEPOS may overlap in certain areas, but I doubt the team is currently using LTSP code.
Mr. Thiel I have both a 60 production and a ten seat non-production environment. I am more than willing to do anything you'd like me to in order to get this moving. I have to admit that my experience is very limited, my first linux exposure was SLP 8, then NLD9 and now SLED. I have taken the CLP courses and have 13 years Netware experience, so I might make a good "average joe" tester. Thank you James
Update: I have contacted Jim McQuillan yesterday via email -- however, no response so far.
Cthiel : Can you or a project manager determine what **especifically and detailed** needs to be done to for this.. estimated times etc ?? Im interested in this matter, and I may be able to devote some time. we can start witha roadmap and create a buildservice project..I guess...
Cristian, as soon as I get the a response from Jim, I'll have a look at it. We currently don't really know the requirements -- so it's hard to give an estimate.
I have posted to Mr Mcquillan about adding him to the cc list here. I am sure he will like that, as i have spoken to him many times about the SUSE work I was doing , he has always been very helpful and interested in getting SUSE on board. for some reason the add cc is not working for me, it seems not to like his e-mail addy of jam@ltsp.org or jam@McQuil.com maybe it's just me being a newb!
Please make sure to use an email address, that belongs to a registered novell.com/bugzilla.novell.com account. Th easiest way to get an account is to browse to https://secure-www.novell.com/selfreg/jsp/createOpenSuseAccount.jsp an create it ;)
things available to get started ogra> https://wiki.edubuntu.org/HowtoWriteLTSP5Plugins shows how to extend it ... but i havent written much developer docs yet <ogra> http://bazaar-vcs.org/ is what we all use for ltsp5 development <ogra> (including redhat) <fxrsliberty> kewl <fxrsliberty> can you get this addy to JM ? https://secure-www.novell.com/selfreg/jsp/createOpenSuseAccount.jsp <ogra> https://launchpad.net/people/ogra/+branches has a list of ltsp branches <ogra> i'll merge all the stuff in ltsp-mainline soon
(In reply to comment #12) We don't need irc talk logs :) what we need is a roadmap, created by a project manager, that describes the tasks needed to be done to have a proper LTSP support into the distribution, so, people ( including me) can take some of them. this is different from the "general" itegration steps ( compiling, packaging etc) SUSE has his own structure, policies and philosophy which must be respected. that kind of document is what Cthiel will provide in the future. Providing LTSP packages is very, very different that producing a **product** that has LTSP functionality, and seriuosly more complex, and I think it requires a multi disciplinary staff of people working on it.. james : IT AINT TRIVAL.
Cristian, I have no clue what I'm doing. I asked the head ubuntu guy what I needed to get started with a MueKow build and he pointed me there and I forwarded it, figured you real programmers would know more about it. no insult or injury intended. James
I'll take this bug for now.
... something for 10.3
Mr. Thiel, Would it make it easier if this where part of an "Add on CD" ? I was hoping to get a project started to create a "k12" Add On cd that includes Centre from www.miller-group.net, Moodle, Klahowya, openbiblio, and some of the features from the "SuSE School Server". it would take a lot of work but if we could get all these programs in and connected to the same LDAP user repositry it would be huge!
As the LTSP5 integration has been started by a community effort lately, I'm closing this bug WORKSFORME.
As most of the hard work has been done and since this is such a valuable project could we reopen this and have the whole team work on the missing parts for days?
Can you please elaborate on the missing parts? What needs to be done to complete the integration?
let me start by saying thank you. the currant issues are: the netboot initrd is 17mg were as the ltsp5 is 2.8 which makes booting slow ( ltsp dev said something about not using glibc), it has a hard time with 586 (pII 350 type stuff)hardware and runs very slow on 128 meg of ram where as ltsp supports as little as 16meg. it could use some tweaking to be more efficient like the "mini-disk" for 10.2 (which recognizes my LTSP 150 hardware and kiwi netboot does not). It won't configure my i810 video. I think it needs an RW FS (ramdrive?) the dhcp module gets stuck randomly- more so on older hardware. It will need the: NDB client server configured ltspfs?fuse? network sound - pulse audio? support for local devices like usb printers, memory sticks, floppies I'm sure there are more things but I don't code so I'm not sure. you can join us @ #opensuse-kiwi on irc.freenode.net and ask cyberorg. as far as I can tell it is running but all of the fine tuning is undone and we would like to include it in the EDU-CD project that is due to release with 10.3.
Hi LTSP5 background: ltsp no longer ships entire chroot distribution, it now just ships scripts and uses the chroot environment built with the distribution's own packages. Customization of the scripts to SUSE will have to be done by us. Current status of LTSP5 on SUSE is: 1. We have kiwi-ltsp chroot image 2. We have packages for ltspfs 3. We have packages for LDM (ltsp display manager) and working ldm, it is display manger over ssh, so no xdmcp required 4. We can mount local devices on clients in the X session of the users on the server manually using ltspfs/fuse 5. To be able to use read-only nfs root we have rudimentary suse-bind-mounts script which needs a lot of improvement Would it be possible to schedule a IRC status meeting and discuss what more needs to be done and what are the changes underway in upstream ltsp5. Thanks -J -- cyberorg
Christoph, there are many things coming into play that a full linux system expert will need to address i.e. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LtspfsVirtualHalDevices also ldm is changing https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LdmImprovements https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LtspBootPerformance https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LtspUpdateManagerIntegration this part will have to be handled by kiwi loadbalancing and HP clustering I would like to know what you determine will be the official support position and what tasks we can count on the team to handle and whether someone would be able to participate in an IRC discussion.
please feel free to converse with Marcus about the above situation. https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=277622
Here is an update to our development effort. We are bit more organized, hopefully we will have git server running soon. http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/KIWI-LTSP Test packages: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cyberorg:/experimental/openSUSE_Factory/noarch/
Given http://en.opensuse.org/LTSP http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/KIWI-LTSP I'd like to ask the folks behind that project, what they think should be added to the distribution? Jigish?
I believe Jigish will tell you that it depends on how much of KIWI will go into the main distro, for basic software rpm's here is a starter list. kiwi-xxx.rpm kiwi-desc-netboot-xxx.rpm kiwi-pxeboot-xxx.rpm kiwi-desc-ltsp-xxx.rpm ldm2-xxx.rpm ltsp-client-xxx.rpm ltspfs-xxx.rpm ltspfs-server-xxx.rpm nbd-xxx.rpm nbd-doc-xxx.rpm And of course the x86_64 versions too I think there is a YaST module in development too. I'm not sure the extent of what you want to know. There are some features that would be nice too. A big feature would be for sabayon and kdekiosk to be able to update the skel and core applications in user profiles , i.e. If I want to put in a new extension to firefox for everyone. (right now sabayon is not able to even store all the changes I make to the slab and application browser)
There is a 1-click pattern created, and the packages available here: https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=server:ltsp http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/server:/ltsp/openSUSE_10.3/kiwi-ltsp.ymp Packages required are: For installation on server: kiwi-desc-ltsp-0.3.11-3.1: OpenSuSE - KIWI-LTSP Image Descriptions nbd-doc-2.9.8-2.1: Network Block Device Server and Client Utilities nbd-2.9.8-2.1: Network Block Device Server and Client Utilities ltspfs-0.4.4-2.2: Fuse based remote filesystem for LTSP thin clients To be installed in ltsp chroot (done by kiwi) ldm2-0.1_070929-2.1: LTSP Display Manager - in C ltspfs-server-0.4.4-2.2: Fuse based remote filesystem daemon for LTSP thin clients ltsp-client-0.3.7-7.2: LTSP client environment Apart from above ltsp specific, some kiwi packages are also required. kiwi kiwi-desc-netboot kiwi-desc-pxeboot LTSP is in the process of being reorganized, Redhat is getting involved and helping them to upstream the project. So new package structure will be done in a months time. It would be good if SUSE got officially involved in this restructure process to have more influence on the future of this great technology. Follow the discussions happening on the Mailing list: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=ltsp-developer and IRC freenode #ltsp
CCing Lars.
With kiwi-ltsp out there, I don't see any need to push this further into the distribution at this point.