[H-GEN] Distro advice

Hilton Travis Hilton at QuarkAV.com
Mon Jan 27 16:17:32 EST 2003


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Hi Harry,

On Mon, 2003-01-27 at 08:55, Robert Stanford wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 2003-01-25 at 01:55, Harry Phillips wrote:
> > 
> > Recently on the list Knoppix was discussed and in the past Linux Terminal
> > Server Project (LTSP) has been mentioned. I liked things from both and would
> > like to combine parts of them.
> > 
> > If you are not familiar with them, a brief over view.
> > 1. LTSP lets you boot on a floppy and runs a Remote X session.
> > 2. Knoppix is a bootable CD that will autodetect your hardware and comes
> > with a preconfigured apps. (I tried it this morning and it was way cool.)
> > 
> > What I would like to do is boot the workstation from a floppy and then it
> > loads all the apps from the server, the difference from LTSP is that the
> > workstation does all the processing. My workstations are Celeron 1.7GHz with
> > no CD-ROMs while the server is a Duron 900Mhz.
> 
> Sounds like a case of accepting a sunken cost (We've spent millions on
> our solar powered umbrellas, we cant stop now or it'll all be lost).
> Computing is very cheap nowadays and even the smallest new processor you
> can buy is amazingly fast.

Even the VIA EPIA board/CPU solutions are quite decent.  For a laugh I
tried running Win XP Home on a 533 MHz unit with 128MB RAM, and it
performed acceptably.  Linux on it was quite nice, too.  :)

> If you look back through the ltsp archives you will find that earlier
> verions did just what was mentioned, mounting /usr etc off the server.
> The only reason it was discontinued was due to architecture differences
> between server and client. i386 machines don't seem too happy being fed
> i686 binaries and libraries. You may find the same thing mixing athlon
> and celeron.

Use the lowest common denominator - they will both most definitely run
i586 binaries, so if you use these, the binaries will run on all of your
systems, admittedly at a slight loss in speed over specifically
CPU-optimized binaries.

> At the end of the day its probably easiest to cram heaps of memory into
> one of the cele 1.7 machines, make it the application server and accept
> the loss of a few thousand bogomips.

If all of your workstations are Celeron or better, then if you optimize
all binaries for your clients for P-III then you'll regain a bit of the
lost performance I mentioned earlier.  You will need separate binaries
for your server and workstations, this way - and getting these wrong
will cause all sorts of hair-pulling episodes.  :)

As Robert said, throw RAM at your workstations.  They'll need it

-- 

Regards,

Hilton Travis                   Email: Hilton at QuarkAV.com
Manager                         Phone: +61-(0)7-3343-3889
Quark AudioVisual               Phone: +61-(0)419-792-394
Quark Computers
(Brisbane, Australia)            http://www.QuarkAV.com/

Non Linear Video Editing Solutions & Digital Audio Workstations
 Network Administration, SmoothWall Firewalls, NOD32 AntiVirus
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