LTSP Improvements

As Ollie blogged, we've been busy little beavers in LTSP-land.

Vagrant Cascadian and Ollie pulled a nice little rabbit out of their hats with the move to NBD for the home drive. It was a lot of work, but thanks to LTSP's plugin system, only took them a few days to get going. Nice.

The LTSP Display Manager runs locally, and as such, might be running on some fairly low-end hardware. It was written in Python before, and although I'm a big fan of Python, it's probably not the best choice for a Pentium 75 with 32 megs of ram. As well, Gideon Romm's excellent suggestion on how to integrate secure-but-slower X over SSH with insecure-but-faster X the normal way within the display manager was enough to make us decide that LDM needed a C rewrite. So off we went. Two weeks later, we've got something to crow about.

After we get the speed improvements put to bed, we need to attack the Virtual HAL devices, and, a burning issue for me at work here, Palm support.

We're making good progress on the specs, and we should have some nice things to show off for Gutsy.

To re-iterate Ollie's plea: if you're running an LTSP network, give Gutsy a try. We LOVE feedback.

Scott