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I’m trying to think of things that are not in ubuntu currently and would make a nice addition without making it bloated…
- Make Firefox aware of apt:// links that link to ubuntu packages that are installable simply by clicking on the link.
- Set up a more centralized wiki section for all things related to LTSP and Ubuntu thin clients, right now you have to dig through tons of stuff to find what you want.
- Make the Ubuntu wiki browsable in different languages. Right now their spread out across multiple domains not supported by Ubuntu. Someone should look into integrating them into one searchable wiki, although with a customizable search in the language/s that you know.
- Speed up boot. Supposedly this was worked on for dapper and feisty, but is it just me or is there not much of a big diff? There is a lot of junk that starts at boot that isn’t neccesary for most people. Ubuntu should atomatically detect what is required by the computer and leave disabled anything that will not work anyways or is not critical, which bring us to the next point…
- A centralized control panel which also includes something like “bum” to cutomize in a more detailed way what runs at boot. The default “services” app that is included now does not give you very much choice and options. Either improve it or replace it with something better.
There are a lot more issues, but these are the ones that tick me off the most at the moment…
At work, we have a Edubuntu Feisty 7.04 server that serves 2-3 thin clients. It also acts as a print and file server.
Setting it up was a piece of cake, I just upgraded it first, installed some additional apps like Thunderbird and then did the following:
Update and upgrade the server:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Remove the old thin client server enivorment:
sudo rm -r /opt/ltsp/i386
Build a new one:
sudo ltsp-build-client
Start the DHCP server, (won’t work without this):
sudo /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server restart
And it was up and running. Then I made some users I made boot floppies from Rom-o-matic, and booted the thin clients and logged in.
That’s all there’s to it. The only problems I’ve encountered so far are related to printing, with it causing the server to stall at times, but as that mean old printer is 12 years old, I’ll have to forgive it.
Here is a nice review of Edubuntu by Carla Schroder.
Next time, I plan to post on how to set up a decent backup plan with rsync or tar.
