[Pkg-ltsp-devel] features of the week

[Vagrant Cascadian]

so, this week i worked on a few new features:

http://llama.freegeek.org/~vagrant/bzr-archives/ltsp/vagrant-ltsp-swap

includes support for encrypted swap with cryptsetup, NBD or local.
the one thing i don't like about this is that the nbd-client's init
script is ran after ours, so i manually called nbd-client from
ltsp-client's init script. we could possibly move ltsp-client's init
script to later in the process to implement it more properly.


http://llama.freegeek.org/~vagrant/bzr-archives/ltsp/vagrant-update-kernels

this changes ltsp-update-kernels to merely call the code inside of the
chroot, and a symlink for the tftp dir, instead of copying all the
kernel/initrd/nbd files into the tftp dir.  this way, whenever a kernel
is installed into a chroot, the updated kernels are automatically
available to the tftp server immediately, rather than waiting for the
admin to call ltsp-update-kernels.

the downside is that it requires tweaking the tftpd servers in small
ways to make it work properly, rather than using the default
configuration (atftpd requires some changes anyways...), such as
pointing the tftp server to /opt/ltsp instead of /var/lib/tftpboot, or
disabling the chroot operation of tftp-hpa.


http://llama.freegeek.org/~vagrant/bzr-archives/ltsp/vagrant-ltsp-locale

plugin to set up the chroot with locales installed on the server. that
was pretty easy. still need to remove some of the hard-coded calls that
set LC_ALL before doing things in the chroot, as any that run after the
plugins stuff should be able to run with proper localization :)


i also worked on a simple plugin to create diskless workstations,
running all the applications locally, rather than connecting to a
server. essentially, it amounts to installing the desktop profile with
tasksel, adding a user, copying home into the tmpfs on boot, adding
/var/lib/gdm to the tmpfs, and tweaking gdm.conf to do autologin. i
don't have it cleanly implemented in a branch yet, but it's pretty
simple. something fancier with authenticated login and such is
definitely possible, but obviously much more complicated :)


made a couple theoretical patches for the kernel handling on hppa and
ia64, but i don't have any hardware to test it on, so i can't really say
it's supported. i was wondering if we couldn't just include a
README.Debian describing which architectures are tested, which are
poorly tested, and which aren't at all, and asking, of course, for
patches :)  this would make it easier for people to test the ltsp on
other architectures, while being honest about the state of ltsp on those
architectures.... thoughts?

i think we could consider the swap and locale patches for the next
release after a little work on them. maybe even the basic workstation
stuff too.

updated some of the recommends in pkg-ltsp main too, for nbd support and
a few other things.

glanced at ogra's ltspfs/localdev code in ubuntu's ltsp, as well as the
ltspfs packages from ubuntu(they build debian packages- don't know if
they work :). if it doesn't break anything, i'd think we could include
the changes to ldm even if the ltspfs stuff doesn't make it into debian-
so that way they have a little easier time of getting localdev support
working in etch.

might be good to wait till the 0.93debian1 packages hit etch before
uploading anything new, just so we have some progress in the right
direction in etch.

live well,
  vagrant