LTSP-5 - The Future of LTSP

We are redesigning LTSP to be easily integrated into Linux Distributions.

The idea and initial specification is something we call the MueKow specification. This spec was developed by Jim McQuillan and Scott Balneaves in February of 2005. Shortly after that, Mark Shuttleworth contacted us and said he was very interested in getting LTSP integrated into Ubuntu. Matt Zimmerman (mdz) did most of the work necessary to get a first release of LTSP into the Ubuntu 'Breezy Badger' release in October of 2005. After that, development of the Ubuntu version of LTSP was handed over to Oliver Grawert (Ogra). Oliver continued to refine the implementation for the Dapper (6.06) release and is now putting the finishing touches on LTSP for the Edgy (6.10) release.

Along the way, Petter Reinholdtsen, Vagrant Cascadian and Otavio Salvador got involved and begin integrating what Ubuntu had done into Debian. Fortunately, as happens sometimes in open source projects, there was alot of collaboration between the Ubuntu guys, the Debian guys and the upstream LTSP guys, and the result is a great implementation of LTSP that can now be found in both Ubuntu and Debian. Certainly there are some differences, but there are far more similarities between the two distros.

In addition to Ubuntu and Debian, the Fedora guys have been working on an implementation. Warren Togami and Eric Harrison are working to put LTSP-5 into Fedora Core 7, which is due to be released in the spring of 2007.

Gentoo users will be happy to know that Donnie Berkholz is working on integrating LTSP-5 into that distro.

For Novell, Christoph Thiel and Andreas Jaeger are working on integrating LTSP-5 into the next release of openSUSE.

In September, 2006, Jim McQuillan hosted an event at his office in Clarkston, Michigan to bring several LTSP developers together with developers from Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora, with the goal of specifying what the next version of LTSP would look like and how it would be integrated into Linux distributions. This event was called LTSP-Hackfest-06.

The following people were in attendance:

• Jim McQuillan - LTSP.org
• Scott Balneaves - LTSP.org
• Gideon Romm - LTSP.org
• Eric Harrison - K12LTSP
• Oliver Grawert - Ubuntu/Edubuntu
• Vagrant Cascadian - Debian
• Warren Togami - Fedora/Redhat

One of the things that came out of our Sept-06 Hackfest is a clear understanding of what LTSP-5 Upstream means. By offloading the care and maintenance of the core components, such as Glibc, Bash, Kernels and most of the other things that distros already manage so well, it frees up the LTSP developers to focus on the parts of thin client technology that really make a difference. Those things include:

• ltsp-build-client
• ltspfs
• Init scripts (control over what services run per workstation)
• Screen scripts
• lpserver
• Swap over NBD
• getltscfg and friends
• Local apps framework
• ltsp-manager (GUI and CLI)
  • ltsp-audit (Diagnostic tool for troubleshooting thin client problems)
• LTSP-Aware application server tools
• ltspinfo/ltspinfod (Mechanism for the server to ask questions of the client)

LTSP is already integrated into Ubuntu and Debian, and Fedora is coming soon (FC7 - Spring 2007) as well as Gentoo. We'd really like for other Linux distributions to integrate LTSP using their own packages.

The motivation behind LTSP-5 is to provide a framework for incorporating diskless thin client functionality into any distribution, while maintaining the distribution's native package structure and update mechanisms within the thin client operating system. By following specific guidelines, any distribution that wants to include LTSP technology can do so. Users of distributions that choose not to incorporate LTSP functionality into the distribution will still be able to incorporate the technology using pre-made thin client operating system images made available by the LTSP maintainers.

LTSP is not a distribution. LTSP is a specification and a collection of scripts and utilities to bring full-featured desktop functionality to a diskless workstation. A system is considered to be running LTSP if it follows the Minimum Requirements and uses the LTSP framework of scripts and utilities.

The LTSP MueKow project was originally considered an experiment to see if it would actually work. The Ubuntu developers have proven conclusively that it does work, and that is why we are now announcing that we are basing future releases of LTSP on the excellent work that Matt, Oliver and many other Ubuntu developers have so generously provided for us.

If you'd like to help to get LTSP integrated into your favorite distro, please take a look at our IntegratingLtsp page.

Some developer advice (or even habits) to be found at DevelopersCorner page.

LTSP-5 Downloads

See DownLoads.