Fwd: [Pkg-ltsp-devel] About Fat Clients

[Vagrant Cascadian]

On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 11:37:36PM +0100, Marc Fargas wrote:
> Er.. I answered privatelly to Petter forgetting to answer to the
> list... sorry :)
> Original follows:
> 
> Thanks Peter but maybe I missed something, the setup described on the
> wiki is almost what I have now, but LTSP runs "ldm" by default which
> runs apps on the server, what I'm looking for is to run the KDE or
> GNOME session locally or remotelly depending on the box.
> 
> i.e. on my computer LTSP would show me kdm or whatever is better and
> start the KDE session on my computer locally while the computer next
> to me would run LDM and then KDE on the server 'cause it's not so
> powerfull.
> 
> So how could I make this "remote/local KDE" switch work ?

well, you have numerous options, none of which are totally easy, though
not real hard if you're determined.
/usr/share/doc/ltsp-server/workstation should provide a basic
configuration that might give you an idea as to some of the things
needed.

one way would be to build two chroot environments, one with gdm or kdm
and all the local applications, mounting home directories, and
centralized authentication or something and then keep a record of which
machines run locally and which run remotely using mac addresses in your
DHCP server.

another way would be to write some scripts that run at boot time and
determine if it has enough CPU and RAM to run the applications locally,
and configure the machines differently by changing the
/opt/ltsp/ARCH/etc/lts.conf file before the ltsp scripts run.

you'll need to play around with SCREEN_07=ldm, SCREEN_07=startx (for
insecure xdmcp connections) and SCREEN_07=some-custom-screen-script (to
disable ldm, and let GDM/KDM start). and you'll need to disable GDM/KDM
by changing /etc/X11/default-display-manager for machines that run ldm
or the "startx" screen script. and fixing it at boot for machines that
need to run it.

well, that's some of the ideas off the top of my head, i'd like to work
on this sort of environment more in the future to simplify the process
:)

live well,
  vagrant