[Robotgroup] FerroCement Plotter Bots with Not So Thin Clients and SunRay 1g from Edubuntu

[Bruce Waters]

Vern , Al, and Don,
     I had not actually tried LTSP yet so I am 
somewhat disappointed that your real experience
says that it performs so badly.   For my own 
activities I was not really planning to use LTSP
for actual workstation seats.   I had been 
contemplating using it for PXE booting of a fleet 
of ferrocement plotters each with a scraptop 
(mostly Gateway Solo 3350s or Dell Latitude
LS 400s or Compaq Presario 1200s) which
I have bought from Goodwill for $20 to $60
each.   I have Edubuntu booting from the local
harddrive on a bunch of these.  I had not yet 
tried PXE booting from an Edubuntu server
and it may be simpler to just provide a PXE
boot server without using LTSP.
     Since I actually only wanted to do remote
administration and software maintenance using
PXE boots, I really do not care if LTSP is 
glacially slow.   I do not even know if I need
LTSP for PXE boots but I did notice that
LTSP was configured during initial load of
Edubuntu from the iso image.   I was thinking
of doing some minimal PXE boot via the 
LTSP infrastructure and scripting up some 
software maintenance to run from the rc.d 
set with a batch version of the Edubuntu
update manager.  
     After slurping up any software upgrades
the ferrocement plotter scraptop will start
up the real application which will 
communicate with a central server for 
plotting data and crew logistics.   This app
would not be transferring X screens from
applications on the central server to the 
scraptop display and therefore would 
probably not suffer from poor LTSP 
performance.  It may not even need 
LTSP running after the PXE boot.
     Since I was planning to read up on 
LTSP for my ferrocement plotter PXE
boot and since the high level hype sounded 
really good for thin client use, I thought I 
might encourage Don to try it out.   But 
if setup is difficult and LTSP performs 
poorly then it is probably a looser in his 
home network environment.
      I also have a SunRay 1g which I
tried to get network booted from 
Edubuntu and I have not succeeded.  
I had hoped to use the SunRay to get a 
good display networked to my Compaq 
DL380 (dual processor, scsi raid 6x9GB, 
with 2 10/100 nics and one 10/100/1000 
nic) rack mounted server running Edubuntu.  
Even though I have installed hpasm and 
manipulated acpi settings to slow the fans, 
it still sounds like an airport in the same 
room with this server.   I thought that
if I could get the SunRay to work, I
could stick the server off in a utility
room to isolate the noise.   The utility
room is a bit too far away for monitor
cable extensions but well within the
reach of dedicated gigabit network 
cabling.
     The Edubuntu patches for SunRay 
network boot are significant and
the interface proprietary.   Others have
supposedly been successful but so far
I have not.   I also suspect that the 
SunRay mods and LTSP PXE may
be incompatible.   Since I was fooling
around with the SunRay I did not yet
try anything with LTSP.   The target
of the SunRay mods is a couple of
releases earlier (edgy) than my version
(gutsy) of Edubuntu and that may be
why I did not get it to work.   
     Has anyone evaluated SunRay
1g performance ?  With Ubuntu ?

Thanks,

Bruce Waters