RE: [Sheflug] LTSP / KDE

[Seb James <seb [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 10:53, Morris, David (Allvac, UK) wrote:
> > 
> > >Next question. Bearing in mind I don't want my shop floor 
> > users to play
> > >about with multitudes of settings and 'toys', what's the 
> > recommendation
> > >for the window manager? I've also got xfce3 on the box but it's
> > >currently set up to use fvwm. If I stick with the latter, where's the
> > >panel configuration stored? I've had a dig in /etc/opt/gnome but
> > >couldn't see anything obvious. I want to be able to give the 
> > users just
> > >what they need and nowt else.
> > 
> > We ended up using Icewm, can be locked down, and has a rather 
> > nice winxp
> > theme
> > that makes it look like any other PC.
> 
> Thanks for everyone's contributions. I've ended up settling with the
> Gnome desktop. We're using SuSE9.0 on the server. When I switched over
> to using gdm, the remote terminals packed up due to lack of display
> manager (sure enough, nothing listening on UDP 177 on the server). I
> made the switch using YAST2's sysconfig editor which did warn me that
> there was no remote access using gdm... I chose to ignore it. I've now
> switched back to using kdm and the terminals are working fine.

Sounds like SUSE didn't enable XDMCP for gdm; this can be done using the
graphical app gdmconfig or by manually editing the gdm.conf file.

> I spent some time last night removing all the toys from the shop floor
> login using nautilus and applications:///
> 
> I've got some stuff printed out from gnome.org/learn (thanks, Seb) about
> locking down the configurations to make them read only which I'll be
> having a play about with later today, but it's looking good.
> 
> The only thing I can see us having to do is provide more than one server
> on the network. There does seem to be a lot of network traffic, possibly
> because we're using diskless terminals so there's no local swap. I don't
> want to kill my LAN links, so display manager / server systems scattered
> around with one central machine running the DHCP and boot stuff would
> appear to be feasible. Having said that, I'm not 100% certain if the swp
> would ocntinue to live on the boot server. I'll have to go back to the
> LTSP docs to see whether I can have the boot happening on something
> other than the DHCP server... I think not.
> 
> Seb: If I said that we were likely only to be using Mozilla for browsing
> and some Java apps and applets, what would your views on RAM in the
> server be? We look like supporting around 8-10 clients from a single
> server with 1GB of PC3200 RAM on a dual-channel MB (Athlon 2800XP), so
> it's quite nippy. 

That spec should be fine, you might add another 512 MB, perhaps. 

You'd be better off using epiphany or galeon for the browser, because
the XML used by mozilla/moz firefox doesn't cache as well so you use
more memory in a thin client environment. The pages look the same as all
use the moz gecko rendering engine.

Seb

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