[GRLUG] New Ubuntu Student Lab with MultiseatX

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Fri, 2009-10-02 at 10:06 -0400, Darrin Sculley wrote:
> With regards to LTSP, the school actually migrated off from a M$
>  Terminal Server 

2000 or 2008?  RDP has gotten better.  Supposedly Server 7 has some
*big* improvements in RDP & video/multimedia.

> setup and they were very disappointed with video playback.  They
> wanted to go back to "local" hardware.

Did you try it with LTSP?  I used to have several LTSP boxes and
multimedia worked surprisingly well - provided you had a decent GPU.  In
my case the GPU cost more than the entirely of the rest of the machine.
Video over gigabit, or even 100Mb, ethernet works very well.

> With local CPU and GPU, video conferencing, movie playback, video
> editing and video-intensive educational "games" are possible.
> We currently have about 30 older machines that are running Ubuntu also
> locally.  A diskless workstation may help there with the aging hard
> drives and poor video performance anyway.  We're using DRBL for
> cloning, perhaps we could go diskless with those seats...

Huh, all new terms.  I never knew it had a fancy name [DRBL = Diskless
Remote Boot in Linux]. Seems kind of funny.  X stations have been
running that way for 30 years - we called it DHCP, tftp, & NFS.  LTSP
just automates all that.  Or before DHCP we have BOOTP,  DHCP was so
much cooler. :)

> Does the group ever do field trips?  If anyone wants to see it in
> action, I might be able to get permission for a tour...