> Lessdisks is a framework for distributed diskless systems. As such, it > _can_ be configured to run all apps locally, or it can execute X11 apps > remotely (insecurely as LTSP3 or SSH-encrypted), or run VNC, or run NX, > or... > > The default setup (and also the most tested AFAIK) is running all X11 > apps remotely, similar to LTSP3 but SSH-encrypted. well, the default, i believe, is to actually use the same remote X11 technology as LTSP does by default: XDMCP (a.k.a. xdm/kdm/gdm). though lessdisks also supports sdm, which uses ssh encrypted sessions (which is merely a few simple wrappers using ssh and Xdialog). lessdisks ran for over two years at freegeek using XDMCP, before sdm existed. i've personally experimented a little using VNC. if you can get it to work for a conventional debian workstation, it's likely able to work with lessdisks, many things without alteration. > If LTSP can be setup exactly like you need it then that is the easiest > to use. But I believe it is easier to customize lessdisks than LTSP, > because everything is Debian (the client filesystem is simply a chroot > on the server). and lessdisks is getting easier all the time, i'd like to think :) the newer upstream versions (0.6.x) has a number of features to make install significantly easier, including more flexible commandline options at chroot install time, debconf pre-seeding (both for the server and chrooted packages), installs from file:/// archives, support for multiple chroots and even man pages! i hope to have an update release in the near future with updated documentation and some tweaks jonas made with argument processing. you can also use lessdisks to create livecds or read-only root disked systems, though it requires much more manual tweaking currently. you could even run lessdisks terminal servers that are themselves "diskless" terminals :) i have dreams of being able to support networked root filesystems other than NFS someday, such as OpenAFS, GFS or who knows what else- the basic framework to make some of that is possible using an initrd and initrd-netboot-tools. just needs someone familiar with the particular network FS technology and the client-side tools needed to mount it. enough shameless plugs, hopefully debian-edu will find some use in lessdisks :) live well, vagrant
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