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.