[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Sugar on LTSP

[Jonas Smedegaard]

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On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 09:36:58AM -0700, Sameer Verma wrote:
>I had a conversation with our tech folks on campus yesterday, and
>Sugar via LTSP (http://www.ltsp.org/) came up. The original discussion
>was about LTSP and thin and fat clients, but this group is in the
>College of Education, so the conversation drifted towards Sugar. We've
> talked about this before, but I'll poke the embers again. Is Sugar
>usable via LTSP? Espcially the collaborative part via ejabberd?

I see no reason why it should _not_ work with LTSP.

I succesfully used 0.82 with Lessdisks, an alternative to LTSP, a year 
ago. I tested it only briefly with a few activities, but Chat was one of 
them, so XMPP (i.e. Jabber) communication works.

Expensive graphics operations will be slower, and no operations must not 
require xshm (shared memory between X11 server and clients).

In other words: don't expect non-free stuff (like Flash) to work, and 
expect free "flashy" things (e.g. Gnash) to be slow.

If I recall correctly, Ubuntu packaging of Etoys (the backend for the 
Sugar activity by the same name) suffered from problems with xshm build 
flags in the past - so make sure to doublecheck that one if it works 
from a remote X11 session.

You can test ahead if it is likely to work in LTSP:

  1) Install a Sugar environment on a regular machine
  2) Test the environment locally, that it actually works
  3) Test the environment from another machine:

     ssh -C -Y your_first_machine sugar-emulator


Kind regards,

  - Jonas

Debian (not Ubuntu) developer

- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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