so every now and then, i'm curious about the possibility of including lessdisks in skolelinux. this obviously requires an evaluation of how lessdisks compares with LTSP... one of the main differences between LTSP and lessdisks (as i understand it): most of LTSP is a bunch of architecture-independent packages (each of which provides support for a specific architecture of terminals) that you install into a directory exported by an NFS server... lessdisks is more of a chroot management system that installs standard debian packages into a chroot, and the chroot gets exported over NFS... these two design differences result in several advantages and disadvantages: lessdisks uses standard debian packages for the chroot environment. the advantages of using standard debian packages mean that you inherit security updates from debian, and can use many of the same packages that you used to install the server when building the lessdisks chroot. sometimes i think of lessdisks as a CDD for diskless terminals. any package available for debian is available for the lessdisks chroot environment with little, if any, modification. it requires the ability to chroot to the terminal's filesystem, which means that hosting lessdisks terminals of a different hardware architecture than the server may be very difficult(requiring access to another server of the appropriate terminal architecture to build the chroot, and then sync it to the NFS server). LTSP is much easier to install in environments where the terminals may be different hardware architectures. packages specifically designed for LTSP may integrate more smoothly with LTSP terminals, but the set of available packages does not even approach those available to debian. other advantages/disadvantages: the user base and documentation for LTSP is much, much broader than lessdisks. many skolelinux installations already are using LTSP- this is a very big factor, i imagine. lessdisks is almost entirely debian-based, and more recent packages will hopefully make it into the official Debian archive someday. LTSP is not yet in the official debian archive(what is blocking that?), and is effectively it's own linux distribution, with it's own release cycle and security updates. the size of lessdisks source and related packages is under 1MB (plus whatever debian packages you use, which can largely be shared with the server installation CD or other media), i'm not sure how the LTSP packages are, but i believe they are fairly large. since any package available for debian is available for lessdisks, this makes it much easier to use for a "Diskless Workstation" (a.k.a. half-thick client), without building custom packages. any other comments on lessdisks, LTSP or other alternatives? thanks for taking the time to explore and explain these sorts of issues. live well, vagrant
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