Re: wirless thin clients with TCOS
On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 04:17:42PM +0100, mariodebian wrote:
> El mié, 14-11-2007 a las 14:50 +0100, Holger Levsen escribió:
> > On Wednesday 14 November 2007 13:32, MarioDebian wrote:
> TCOS works too, but today isn't in Debian, this bug is easy fixed when
> someone sponsor the packages and ftp-master allow upload.
> I had try to upload one time, but packages don't have correct
> debian/copyright file, and was rejected.
and i'm guessing that's been fixed? any other issues?
> 1.- A teacher control panel (one year ago Thin Client Manager don't
> exists) and other apps (iTALC) runs over VNC (slow performance)
seems like this could be useful for LTSP as well.
> 2.- Better audio system (one year ago all thin client implementations
> use esound) I test PulseAudio and contribute to project, making work
> with some apps like JClic (spanish educational author software) now LTSP
> can use PulseAudio but not comes as default.
pulseaudio is definitely the default for ltsp in sid, and i think lenny
too. etch is still esound, and would require some patches to get
pulseaudio working.
> 4.- Magic devices. TCOS uses LTSPFS but I have created a python GUI,
> that allow to mount/umount devices very easy. Screencast:
> http://www.tcosproject.org/tcos-devices-ng/
>
> Support floppy, cdrom, hard disk partitions, cdaudio, and USB sticks.
>
> Other interesting GUI is for change volume levels in thin client:
> http://soleup.eup.uva.es/mario/gallery/1/TcosMonitor-sonido-3.png
>
> This simple gui retrieve (using xmlrpc) all sound card channels, render
> with sliders and allow to mute/unmute and up/down. With LTSP only can
> change (using gstreamer+PulseAudio) PCM and master, and not always work.
all this also sounds useful to LTSP...
> I know that LTSP 5.x is bigger & better and today use similar things
> that TCOS, but as very small free software business, one year ago I
> needed to offer to my clients a better thin client support, not only
> install schools classroms with LTSP or PXES.
sure.
> If we have a lot of Desktops (KDE, Gnome, Xfce ...)
> Why can have different thin client services?
well, it's not that we *can't* have different ones, but if there is a
lot of similarity in code and concepts, why not work towards common
code?
to me, sharing code is one of the strengths of free software.
> Do you thing is better to create a big LTSP patch?
i don't think the patch would necessarily be that big- instead of
building the initrd and tcos images using the host systems files, build
the LTSP chroot and then build tcos-like images from the chroot itself.
already, the version of LTSP in ubuntu (not yet functional in debian)
generates a squashfs image, which is exported using NBD (network block
device). it would be trivial to make this an image that gets downloaded
instead, possibly using some methods to trim out extra cruft like TCOS
does.
TCOS is young project compared to LTSP. clearly, there are some things
that TCOS does very well, but LTSP has a long history and large user
base. and while there are differences in (current) implementation, the
basic goal of the two projects is largely the same.
i don't think the question is "which is better?" so much as "what can
each project learn from the other?"
live well,
vagrant
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