[Novalug] LTSP (was: Booting (several PCs) from USB drive)

[Joel Fouse]

LTSP is something I'm suddenly very interested in and would love if
someone had some useful quick-start pointers.  My wife has been using
Ubuntu for a year or two now on a desktop PC, and I recently upgraded
her to Gutsy.  The only problem is that she occasionally has bad back
flareups which require her to spend large amounts of time on the couch
or recliner, during which periods of time she often wants to borrow my
laptop.  Hence my motivation. ;D  I have in my possession an older
laptop (I'm thinking P-III 500-ish, mebbe 128Mb; don't recall offhand),
and I was planning on seeing if I could get some version of *buntu
running on it for her to use in such situations when really all she
wants is web and email.  Getting it installed is its own challenge,
because there isn't a built-in CD and bios doesn't provide boot from USB
or network.  At this point I'm thinking I'll have to yank the drive and
stick it in something else to install, and try to deal with the
consequences of the massive hardware switch after the fact.  But that's
beside the point.  

Assuming I can get to the point of installing /something/, I started to
wonder if something like LTSP might be a handier solution using her
desktop as the "server", so that she would still be working with her
normal prefs, desktop files, etc.  Is this possible?  Am I missing the
mark of what LTSP is capable?  How would I go about setting up such a
thing?  The ltsp.org site isn't quite clear to my quick glance -- I'm
not sure at various points whether they're referring to the client or
the server. :P

Any thoughts appreciated!

- Joel


On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 12:48 -0500, Clif Flynt wrote:

> My solution to the clusters was the LTSP linux project and
> booting off a server.
> 
> I've used the 4.2 LTSP with Suse, and am testing the 5.0 LTSP
> with Ubuntu.  It appears that either will work OK.  I know that
> the 4.2/Suse combination lets me control multiple tasks on the
> slave processors from the master server.
> 
> I've not played with PVM or CPS or any of the formal parallel
> computing projects - our application divides into many tasks,
> rather than one huge task that can be subdivided.
> 
> Clif
> 
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