GoodGNUs

I spent the early part of this week helping Birmingham Friends of the Earth upgrade their LTSP system; one installed by my former colleague, the late Richard Rothwell. There’s always space for a hiccough or two across a major upgrade, but as ever the excellent community-contributed documentation on the Ubuntu fora provided answers to every puzzle.

The advantage with LTSP is that this is only worked through once, on one PC, to upgrade a whole office network. For an environmental organisation like Birmingham FoE, however, there are more compelling reasons for choosing the technology.

What is LTSP?

Linux Terminal Server Project may sound like jargon, but what it means is a return to the computer mainframe days when one computer did all the work for thousands of connected dumb terminals (little more than teletypewriters) at the user end.

An LTSP installation - many desktops, one new computer

In this case the mainframe is no clanking, room-sized monstrosity, but a Quad-core Xeon with a few extra GB of RAM, and the terminals are older PCs discarded as useless, and once destined for landfill.

In this country we throw out 3 million PCs every year. The majority of which could be used in homes, offices and community centres, given the apropriate GNU/Linux install - but even the slowest and lowliest can live again with LTSP.As old computers are free, all you need is space: that spare room in the community centre can be an income-producing training room full of PCs.

Take a 12 year-old PC, remove the hard disks & fans, and plug into an LTSP network. The PC network boots from the server, finding a Linux kernel to run, then displaying apps which are running remotely and speedily on the server. Ancient PCs with only 64MB of memory sit on desks running OpenOffice.org, Mozilla FireFox & dozens of other memory-heavy programs.

Each desktop PC is drawing half the power it would with its own hard disk and the heavier load of local apps - alternatively special thin-client terminals can be used, drawing even less power: silent and cool-running. Each PC can be simply replaced with another without fuss, as all of the apps and data are on the server.

There’s now just one computer to back up. One to upgrade. Any user can sit at any desk and have all of her e-mails and docs there - ideal for busy organisations with many volunteers, or in education.

A footnote

Many times LTSP enabled some schools (such as Skegness Grammar School in the UK, and the Spanish region of Extremadura) to massively expand their IT provision, while saving money. In the case of Extremadura, this meant one PC per 2 pupils in every classroom, and 2 weeks for 2 people to update 80,000 desktops!

After a decade of opposing attempts to introduce Free Software systems like this to UK schools, the quango BECTA met with its demise this week. We now have the chance to get more IT, more freedom, and better learning opportunities into school for less money & lower power consumption. Perhaps it’s lucky that the money ran out before the education budget got committed to “An iPad for every child”?