Work on Sabayon, upstream and in Edubuntu

As one of our goals for the upcoming release of Edubuntu, we really wanted to get a working Sabayon to allow teachers and systems administrators to manage user profiles. Sabayon's been in a buggy state in Ubuntu for a bit, so I decided to buckle down and start learning the codebase.

Federico, who has already come to LTSP users aid by working on his excellent patches to Firefox to reduce pixmap usage, once again stepped up to the plate and answered my many silly questions and accepted several patches from me. As well, his work on getting Sabayon working with Xephyr has basically turned Sabayon into a useful tool again.

I feel that this tool is such an important one, not only for regular desktop users, but especially for LTSP users, that I'm planning on becoming a permanent upstream contributor. Sorry, Federico, looks like you're stuck with me!

I'm not saying all the bugs have been beaten out of it quite yet, but it's gone from a piece of software that wouldn't even boot before, to one in which you can edit and apply profiles.

And today, thanks to stgraber's help, it landed in Karmic.

Hooray for profiles!

LTSP docs, Edubuntu handbook

So, looks as if Nubae and I will resurrect the languishing Edubuntu handbook, and get it up-to-date. Between the work that's been put in on the LTSP docs upstream (http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/LtspDocumentationUpstream), the work that Lns has put in on the Ubuntu wiki (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP) and the commitment to get the Handbook back in shape, things are coming along nicely.

Feel like helping? Do the needful...

Great moments in #ltsp democracy

10:42 <wima> for the moment, i just disabled those damn floppies
10:42 <vagrantc> i wonder if we shouldn't put some sort of check in ltspfs to detect the "user not in own group" problem
10:43 <rjune> perhaps it should be documented
10:43 <sbalneav> rjune++
10:43 <sbalneav> I volunteer rjune.
10:43 <sbalneav> all in favour?
10:43 <vagrantc> ++
10:43 <sbalneav> ++
10:44 <wima> ++
10:44 <jammcq> rjune++
10:44 <rjune> dammit

LTSP BTS 2008 After Action Report

So, I've been back for a couple of days now, and I keep saying to myself, "Self, time to update the blog." So, here I am.

I won't go into the gory details of the fun we had, because all of you who are reading this (all 3 of you) probably don't care. Suffice it to say that lobsters were eaten, Linie Aquavit was drunk, and blueberry pancakes were cooked.

On to the tech details.

I was just commenting on #ltsp that it seems like we've crossed a tipping point. With Ubuntu/Canonical's early help, we did a very rapid, but buggy/incomplete first cut of LTSP5. We've spent a year or two adding features with LTSP luminaries such as ogra, Gadi, vagrantc, warren, and myself frantically coding and fixing bugs. I think the last big ticket item we got nailed down in the summer in Portland at Freegeek was the work I started with localapps, and warren and Gadi carried over the finish line.

This one felt different, in a good way. The frantic "Arrrgh, how do we fix this bug!!!" is beginning to die down, to be replaced by the more calm and thoughtful, "Hmmm, how can we improve this?"

stgraber, fgiraldeau and myself worked on some great LDM improvements. Better logging, fixing an annoying race condition, better failed password timeouts, etc. are all things that have come out of this hackfest. Plus the work they've been doing with Revolution Linux for the cluster LTSP that's making it's way into upstream is great.

Another great thing is the great distro support now. warren's handling Fedora, vagrantc's all over Debian, ogra/stgraber have Ubuntu wrapped up solid, dberkholtz and johnny have been working on integrating into Gentoo (still waiting for the compile to finish OH THAT JOKE NEVER GETS OLD) CyberOrg et al are working on Kiwi for OpenSuSE. This is what we wanted to see, and it's great.

For cute fans of LTSP... err, Qt fans of LTSP, chrisinajar and brendan0powers showed up, and started hacking, and got a Qt greeter fleshed out.

Docs have made some great strides. Nubae, cliebow, djohnston and myself have worked hard to bring them up to shape, and they're starting to look good. bzr get lp:~ltsp-docwriters/ltsp/ltsp-docs-upstream for all the gory details. I'm going to work with LaserJock from #edubuntu to hopefully get us started down the packaging road, and hopefully the others above will kick in. yup/apt-get install ltsp-docs, anyone?

In short, lots of great bugfixes, improvements, and a few new features. We've got some bugs I want to squash in Hardy (what I run here at Legal Aid), so LaserJock's going to help me backport/SRU some of the work we've done, and we'll get it out there for the Long Term Support release. I know vagrantc's been madly uploading into -experimental for Debian.

I'll close with this: Like thin client computing? Can you code in C/sh/docbook? Like the taste of lobster/steak? Enjoy beer? Know any good Norwegian Drinking Songs? Own a tuxedo? Then you might have a bright future in the exciting world of LTSP development.

LTSP BTS Day 1

The LTSP crew is back in Bah Hahbah (Bar Harbor) Maine. More to come as the day progresses....

Local Apps 2: The Next Morning

Well, now that the affects of the Woodchuck Draft Cider and Smuttynose Shoals Pale Ale (thanks Eric!) have worn off, perhaps a further expansion of my worse-than-average typed blog posting of last night can be expanded upon.

Localapps, for those uninitiated with LTSP lingo, is the idea of running an application down on the thin client itself. Normally, once you log into a thin client, your session exists on the server, and you do all the work ON the server. So, if you have a classroom full of kids, say 30, running Firefox, you have 30 instances of Firefox running on the server. If you have 30 kids watching videos in flash, you have 30 instances of Firefox and flash running on the server.

Ouch is right.

What you'd really like to have the option of doing, if you have beefy enough thin clients, is run the Firefox + flash down on the thin client itself. The problem is, your thin client has no concept of who it's user is: that's all up on the server. Name Switch Services, home directory, plumbing, etc. All has to come from the server, and it's all a bit of a bear to set up. ("What do you mean I need to get LDAP going? What's an LDAP?")

However, we've come up with a cool little method (ltsp-localapps spec on Launchpad, for those interested) that allows us to do it with a bare minimum of fuss, muss, and bother.

So, armed with beverages, thin clients, laptops, and a general sense of merriment and excitement, 4 intrepid LTSP hackers set off to get it going on All Hallow's Eve. Eric Harrison, Francis Giraldeau, Stéphane Graber, and myself hacked for a couple of hours, and got it going. First app launched was Xclock, closely followed by Firefox! Not satisfied with this major victory, we decided to push on, and installed flash in the chroot. After some futzing around, (Stéphane realizing that we needed to add the user to the audio group on the thin client itself), we were watching videos on YouTube. On the thin client.

For posterity: first video watched was Wierd Al Yankovic's "White and Nerdy", what else? At one point, we were playing 2 simultaneously! All this on a 900mhz thin client with 256 megs of ram. Not too shabby.

Local apps

4 4geeks, 4 beers, 2 hours. Firefox running on a local thin client.
With flash. And sound. Oooooooh yeaaahhhh