[ale] LTSP in Ubuntu
Daniel Howard
dhhoward at comcast.net
Sun Nov 30 17:53:33 EST 2008
I just installed Ubuntu/LTSP on a classroom server, and overall it was a
total pleasure. Worked out of the box with two NIC server, was able to
add all the educational titles with ease (couldn't add some in
CentOS-K12LTSP, e.g.), applications that used to fail unless I launched
them in a window (Childsplay, GCompris) worked flawlessly, and most
importantly Flash sound worked automatically after installing the flash
plugin; just had to go to a site with Flash, it pointed me to Flash 10
for Linux, and sound on the client worked flawlessly.
One nag however: video is noticeably slower on the 128 MB HP thin
clients with the Ubuntu based LTSP compared to the Fedora/Centos based
LTSP, both Flash video like on YouTube/SesameStreet, as well as video
for highly animated games like CircusLinux, e.g.
I tried switching the desktop to Xfce, that seemed to speed it up a
little, but still noticeably slower than under Fedora/Centos.
I suspect this is just the Ubuntu folks being behind the curve on LTSP
compared to the Fedora/Centos gang, but thought I'd offer the results
here in case anyone knows of something I can try to speed up the
performance.
Again, otherwise, it was a piece of cake to install and setup, and I'm
very happy with the results, so I recommend it, especially for anyone
that has older PCs to use as clients that might have a bit more RAM in
them, which is what I suspect would really help here, but unfortunately
not possible for the HP thin clients I have to work with.
Best,
Daniel
--
Daniel Howard
President and CEO
Georgia Open Source Education Foundation
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