[00:10] <Ahmuck-Jr> ltsp uses server hardware, however i just stumbled upon drbl
[00:10] <Ahmuck-Jr> which is a distributed system.  a cloud?
[00:21] <sbalneav> http://drbl.sourceforge.net/faq/
[00:22] <sbalneav> Second link from the top
[00:22] <sbalneav> drbl = ltsp fat clients
[00:22] <sbalneav> everything runs on the client hardware.
[00:22] <Ahmuck-Jr> so why not use drbl?
[00:22] <Ahmuck-Jr> rather than ltsp?
[00:22] <sbalneav> Who should use drbl?
[00:22] <Ahmuck-Jr> nubae script does fat clients, but doesn this as well?
[00:23] <Ahmuck-Jr> well, anybody
[00:23] <sbalneav> Maybe you don't have clients powerful enough to run everything on them
[00:24] <sbalneav> a 128 meg pentium 3 will make a nice ltsp thin client
[00:24] <Ahmuck-Jr> the clients run better standalone
[00:24] <Ahmuck-Jr> 1ghz, 512mb ram
[00:24] <sbalneav> Yeah, so?
[00:24] <Ahmuck-Jr> sbalneav: ok, well, i'm here this evening.  so, i need to figure out what's causing my slooooowdown on my nice thin clients
[00:24] <sbalneav> Run drble if you want
[00:24] <Ahmuck-Jr> let's start with firefox crashing
[00:25] <sbalneav> No one forces you to run LTSP :)
[00:25] <Ahmuck-Jr> let me do some reading again on firefox and localapps, i'll check there
[00:26] <Ahmuck-Jr> sbalneav: what i keep wondering is why ltsp keeps getting pushed as a "classroom" solution rather than say LDAP/NFS/NBD or DRBL
[00:26] <sbalneav> Because hundreds of thousands of people use it worldwide.
[00:27] <sbalneav> And it's been under continuous development and support for 10+ years.
[00:28] <sbalneav> and lots and lots of classrooms don't HAVE good up-to-date hardware, they have older stuff they want to use.
[00:28] <Ahmuck-Jr> hundreds of people used to drive model A - Fords, but and for 10 years or more, but they no longer do so
[00:28] <sbalneav> So, don't use LTSP :)
[00:28] <Ahmuck-Jr> can you name a classroom with antiquated hardware?
[00:28] <sbalneav> Sure
[00:28] <sbalneav> tons
[00:29] <sbalneav> My son's
[00:29] <Ahmuck-Jr> i can't in my area
[00:29] <sbalneav> every single solitary classroom in Brazil
[00:29] <Ahmuck-Jr> the government and ms has made a deal and they are all on better hardware than my best machine
[00:29] <sbalneav> You're using your first world thinking again.
[00:29] <Ahmuck-Jr> recently one of the schools sold all thier 2ghz, 256mb ram machines for 3.00/machine
[00:29] <sbalneav> OK, so use tsomething else then.
[00:30] <sbalneav> *I* don't care WHAT you use.
[00:30] <Ahmuck-Jr> that's not my point.  my point is edubuntu, etc. only looking at the ltsp portion?
[00:30] <Ahmuck-Jr> and only promoting it?  why not alternatives
[00:30] <Ahmuck-Jr> for those that can use it
[00:31] <sbalneav> Because edubuntu only has two people working on it who know about, and care about, thin clients and classrooms
[00:31] <sbalneav> and both of them happen to be LTSP developers.
[00:31] <Ahmuck-Jr> hrm, where is the edubuntu pages?  i'm going to assign someone in my office to make a simpler tutorail for using ubuntu and rdbl or LDAP/NFS/NDB
[00:31] <Ahmuck-Jr> *sigh*
[00:32] <sbalneav> If you'd like to promote drbl, then go ahead, by *all* means.
[00:32] <sbalneav> Just make sure you're here
[00:32] <sbalneav> day in
[00:32] <sbalneav> day out
[00:32] <sbalneav> unpaid
[00:32] <sbalneav> like me, to support it :)
[00:33] <sbalneav> LTSP's been around the longest
[00:33] <sbalneav> There's a LOT of ltsp out there
[00:33] <sbalneav> k12ltsp, l12linux, skolelinux
[00:33] <sbalneav> they're ALL using LTSP.
[00:33] <Ahmuck-Jr> aren't you paid by your company?
[00:34] <sbalneav> I'm paid by Legal Aid Manitoba to administer Legal Aid's computers
[00:34] <sbalneav> LTSP development happens on my own dime, on my own time.
[00:35] <Ahmuck-Jr> a little sour tonight sbalneav ?
[00:35] <sbalneav> No
[00:35] <sbalneav> Just stating a fact.
[00:35] <sbalneav> You asked, I told you.
[00:36] <sbalneav> You also asked why we didn't promote drbl, and that's simply because no one here KNOWS drbl
[00:37] <Ahmuck-Jr> ok, that's what i needed to know
[00:37] <Ahmuck-Jr> thanks
[00:37] <sbalneav> I'm here all night, if you want a hand with your firefox issue, let me know.
[00:38] <Ahmuck-Jr> i noticed bugs about sound again
[00:38] <Ahmuck-Jr> coming through
[00:38] <sbalneav> Pulse looks like it's got problems.
[00:38] <Ahmuck-Jr> ok, well i'm here.  let me locate the documentation on ltsp and local apps and make sure everything is in place
[00:38] <Ahmuck-Jr> i don't have the memory to remember what i did last week, i have to read and re-read
[00:39] <sbalneav> I suspect pulse's network code has some bugs.
[00:39] <sbalneav> LTSP tends to excercise bugs in a lot of code that "normally" doesn't get executed.
[00:40] <Ahmuck-Jr> another question.  i notice that from release to release it seems there's always something different one has to do to get something to work.  is this because of rapidly changing libraries?  backward compatibility is not built in anymore?
[00:41] <sbalneav> No, linux in general has, for the last 2-3 years, been rapidly loosing its roots.
[00:41] <Ahmuck-Jr> as in the way it used to handle things?
[00:41] <sbalneav> It bothers me quite a bit, because Linux, it seems, has now determined that the way it wants to go is to be another microsoft.
[00:41] <Ahmuck-Jr> roots as in /etc/fstab, etc.
[00:41] <sbalneav> correct.
[00:42] <sbalneav> everything's dbus, policykit, etc.
[00:42] <Ahmuck-Jr> yes, i agree.  it's getting hard to find the moving target
[00:42] <Ahmuck-Jr> whose to blame?  users, developers or distros?
[00:42] <sbalneav> it's added a LOT of complexity, and, as far as I've seen, has had absolutely NO real benefit.
[00:43] <Ahmuck-Jr> how do you fix it, go back to a starting point and re-write?
[00:43] <Ahmuck-Jr> wouldn't this affect apps as well?
[00:43] <sbalneav> Users for demanding Linux look and act exactly like windows, distros for pushing devels to give the users what they want, devels for giving in, IMHO
[00:45] <Ahmuck-Jr> i'm a user of sorts.  i like the gui.  however when the i had problems in gui mode i knew i could always drop to command line and find a man page or --help or something and do it from there.  it's getting harder to do things from command line
[00:45] <Ahmuck-Jr> all the changes are confusing for us old guys
[00:45] <sbalneav> yes, it's becoming increasingly difficult to get anything done.
[00:46] <sbalneav> for someone like me who learned his unix back in the 80's, it's very frustrating
[00:46] <sbalneav> But the command line has been more or less officially declared A Bad Thing (c)(r), and so...
[00:46] <Ahmuck-Jr> http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2009/12/lucid-to-get-aero-style-rgba.html
[00:47] <Ahmuck-Jr> :) just for u :)
[00:47] <Ahmuck-Jr> whoa, i think you just might be older than i
[00:47] <Ahmuck-Jr> your what, 82 now ?
[00:47] <sbalneav> 41
[00:47] <Ahmuck-Jr> lol
[00:47] <sbalneav> I learned unix back when I was in high school
[00:48] <sbalneav> in '85
[00:48] <Ahmuck-Jr> i went to private school, but no computer
[00:49] <Ahmuck-Jr> i shuddered at the thought sitting in front of a computer ... till i saw a dos prompt
[00:49] <Ahmuck-Jr> in 92
[00:49] <sbalneav> I knew more about programming Commodore 64's than my high school Computer Teacher did, so to get me out of the classroom so I'd quit correcting his mistakes, I was given an account on the new "unux" system on the "glass tty" (a vt100 terminal) that they were handing out to the schools.
[00:50] <sbalneav> At that point, the internet had Telnet, FTP, and RFC 822 had been published the year before, and sendmail 0.8mumblesomething was installed on the box.
[00:50] <sbalneav> I learned to use email by reading RFC 822 :)
[00:51] <sbalneav> To this day, I'm capable of hand crafting my emails by telnetting to port 25 :)
[00:51] <Ahmuck-Jr> oooh, scary
[00:51] <sbalneav> So, yeah, all this "no touchy-the-command-line-you-must-do-it-from-the-gui" stuff bothers me.
[00:52] <sbalneav> Hence, the reason I packaged cnetworkmanager :)
[00:54] <sbalneav> Hmm, installed gnash tonight
[00:55] <sbalneav> I'm playing a flash video right now.
[00:55] <Ahmuck-Jr> sooo, really there are three ways to run a classroom so far ... ltsp, drbl, and ldap/nfs/nbd
[00:55] <sbalneav>  18:55:06 up 13 days,  9:32,  6 users,  load average: 0.08, 0.03, 0.00
[00:55] <Ahmuck-Jr> using pupet and cfengine or cloning
[00:55] <Ahmuck-Jr> what's ur client specs?
[00:56] <sbalneav> one ghz via boards with one gig of ram.
[00:56] <Ahmuck-Jr> ah ha.  it's the gig of ram
[00:57] <sbalneav> But I run everything on the server.
[00:57] <sbalneav> I don't run any localapps.
[00:57] <Ahmuck-Jr> i'm going to do a new slogan.  don't believe the hype until you've seen the tripe
[00:57] <Ahmuck-Jr> no localapps?  why the gig of ram then?
[00:58] <sbalneav> When I updated them all 1.5 years ago, it was the best price point.
[00:59] <sbalneav> I updated all 185 clients for $35,000
[00:59]  * Ahmuck-Jr falls over
[01:00] <sbalneav> was about 130 for the mobo, 45 for the stick of ram, and taxes :)
[01:01] <sbalneav> I run all of Legal Aid Manitoba's systems, which is 6 sites spread over a 900 kilometer radius, for $75,000 per year
[01:01] <sbalneav> That's all in
[01:01] <sbalneav> all licenses, all datacomm costs, all hardware, all software, everything.
[01:02] <sbalneav> Only thing that's not in there is salaries.
[01:02] <Ahmuck-Jr> http://pastebin.be/22427
[01:02] <Ahmuck-Jr> Manitoba, Africa?
[01:02] <sbalneav> Manitoba Canada.
[01:03] <Ahmuck-Jr> ah, ok
[01:03] <sbalneav> We're Legal Aid.  No one wants to fund us. We're the poor cousins of govt.
[01:03] <sbalneav> You probably don't want NBD_SWAP = True and USE_LOCAL_SWAP = True at the same time.
[01:03] <Ahmuck-Jr> how's the weather?
[01:04] <sbalneav> -17 C at the moment.
[01:04] <Ahmuck-Jr> i've been thinking about tripping to CA, but more around Alberta
[01:04] <sbalneav> s'posed to go down to -28 tonight.
[01:04] <sbalneav> Alberta's beatiful, up in the mountains.
[01:04] <Ahmuck-Jr> i don't think the local hard drives are formated
[01:04] <Ahmuck-Jr> iirc, they were dbaned
[01:05] <sbalneav> I'd turn off USE_LOCAL_SWAP.
[01:05] <Ahmuck-Jr> what's hotel rates like there?
[01:05] <sbalneav> You say they've got 512 megs of ram?
[01:06] <sbalneav> depends.  If you're going to stay in Banff, prolly 200+ a night :)
[01:06]  * Ahmuck-Jr falls over again
[01:06] <sbalneav> If you're going to stay in a small town, probably 59 bucks at the super 8
[01:06] <Ahmuck-Jr> super8,  that's larger than i was thinking about
[01:07] <sbalneav> Banff is *the* tourist attraction, so it'd be like staying at the Mariott times square.
[01:07] <sbalneav> It depends on where you're planning on going.
[01:08] <Ahmuck-Jr> somewhere remote, homey
[01:09] <sbalneav> Small town, locally run hotels tend to run anywhere from $35 -> $60 bucks a night.
[01:09] <sbalneav> B&B's can be even cheaper.
[01:10] <Ahmuck-Jr> ah, and cozier
[01:10] <Ahmuck-Jr> friendlier
[01:25] <Ahmuck-Jr> in chroot, i need to install firefox and flashplugin-nonfree - flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound
[01:26] <sbalneav> Not sure about the extrasound.
[01:27] <sbalneav> But firefox and flashplugin-nonfree for sure.
[01:27] <Ahmuck-Jr> k, i did not have flash installed in the chroot before
[01:27] <Ahmuck-Jr> i assume this may have been my flash issue
[01:27] <Ahmuck-Jr> for some reason, i was under the impression that someone stated if firefox was a localapp, then flash was too
[01:28] <Ahmuck-Jr> where does the tradeoff between localapp and serverapp start?
[01:28] <Ahmuck-Jr> scribus-ng for example?
[01:28] <sbalneav> Well, scribus should make a good server app
[01:29] <sbalneav> It will generate load while it starts
[01:29] <sbalneav> but once it's running, it's load is ONLY based upon user input.
[01:29] <sbalneav> So if the user's not doing anything, it's not generating any load at all
[01:29] <sbalneav> OpenOffice.org's another good example.
[01:30] <sbalneav> firefox + flash is the opposite end of the spectrum.  User can be generating scads of cpu time, even tho' they're doing "nothing"
[01:30] <Ahmuck-Jr> ie, user input, digital camera images?
[01:31] <Ahmuck-Jr> sooo, looking at the manual, every server update also requires a ltsp choot update as well
[01:33] <sbalneav> Ideally, yes.
[01:33] <Ahmuck-Jr> local_apps_menu does what?
[01:34] <Ahmuck-Jr> btw, u stated u were not utilizing localapps on your thin clients?
[01:34] <sbalneav> Correct
[01:34] <Ahmuck-Jr> sooo, how are you not crashing in 9.10 with firefox/flash?  is this a pulse problem for us?
[01:35] <sbalneav> Well, at work, I'm using 8.04
[01:35] <sbalneav> At home I use 9.10
[01:35] <Ahmuck-Jr> that explains it
[01:35] <sbalneav> Could be pulse, could be several things.
[01:35] <Ahmuck-Jr> 8.04 was more stable for ltsp
[01:35] <Ahmuck-Jr> pulse was stable in 8.04
[01:35] <sbalneav> No, actually not
[01:36] <Ahmuck-Jr> for me it was
[01:36] <sbalneav> 8.04 had TONS of problems with firefox
[01:36] <Ahmuck-Jr> before 9.10 i was looking at regressing
[01:36] <sbalneav> until stgraber figured out the bug in the X libs.
[01:36] <Ahmuck-Jr> perhaps it was 8.10 i had sucess with
[01:37] <sbalneav> once stgraber tracked that down, then things got better.
[01:37] <sbalneav> again, many "ltsp" bugs aren't ANYTHING to do with LTSP itself.
[01:38] <sbalneav> they're bugs in firefox, pulse, xlibs, xorg, etc, that get triggered because these guys aren't testing their programs anymore in remote X situations.
[01:38] <Ahmuck-Jr> makes sense
[01:38] <sbalneav> The libxcb bug was a classic example.
[01:39] <sbalneav> everyone "blamed" ltsp, "it must be something you guys are doing!!!!!" we were told
[01:39] <sbalneav> until one of us (stgraber) sat down, and emulated it with a full desktop
[01:39] <sbalneav> Once we showed that, then the X guys started to offer help
[01:40] <sbalneav> then we tracked it down, and it was PURELY a fault in libxcb, which is supplied by xorg
[01:41] <sbalneav> but since xorg pretty much EXCLUSIVELY tests only local X + apps, and does little to no remote testing, it was completely missed by them.
[01:41] <sbalneav> And so it goes.
[01:53] <Ahmuck-Jr> 	adm (4)
[01:53] <Ahmuck-Jr> Info: port 2000 is already defined with /opt/ltsp/images/i386.img in inetd.conf
[01:53] <Ahmuck-Jr> Info: taking no action.
[01:57] <sbalneav> That's fine.
[01:57] <sbalneav> You just rebuilt the image, right?
[01:58] <Ahmuck-Jr> yep
[03:26] <sbalneav> Ahmuck-Jr: Things going alright?
[04:00] <brian> New to Ubuntu. I need some help with video settings. ANybody up for it?
[04:36] <cprofitt> hello all
[04:37] <sbalneav> Hello
[04:41] <cprofitt> sbalneav: are you from the US?
[04:44] <sbalneav> No, Canada
[04:44] <sbalneav> Winnipeg, Manitoba, to be exact.
[04:45] <cprofitt> Ah... cool.
[04:45]  * sbalneav looks at temp
[04:45] <cprofitt> Are you a Dev on Edubuntu or an Educator?
[04:45] <sbalneav> yeah -18C here
[04:45] <sbalneav> cool :)
[04:45] <cprofitt> ouch
[04:45] <cprofitt> we are a bit cold, but not that cold
[04:45] <sbalneav> Dev.  I have nothing to do with education.
[04:45] <sbalneav> I'm a systems administrator for Legal Aid Manitoba.
[04:46] <cprofitt> Nice -- do they use Open Source?
[04:46] <sbalneav> We're an all linux shop
[04:46] <cprofitt> I am stuck as a sysadmin in a school district... and we use Windows/OS X
[04:46] <sbalneav> We run 185 LTSP thin clients.
[04:47] <sbalneav> Firefox/OpenOffice.org/Thunderbird
[04:47] <sbalneav> I've been a developer for LTSP for 10 years
[04:48] <cprofitt> Nice... perhaps at some point I will work in a Linux shop...
[04:48] <sbalneav> And I've contributed to the free software movement for 15+ years.
[04:48] <cprofitt> I am pondering how to raise educators awareness of F/OSS
[04:48] <sbalneav> I ran my first Linux distro in fall of 1993
[04:48] <cprofitt> I ran Linux in 1993, but gaming kept me running Windows until two years ago
[04:48] <cprofitt> and I did not get in to IT until 1997
[04:49] <sbalneav> I gave up windows at home back in 1999
[04:49] <sbalneav> Last version of windows I actually know anything useful about is Windows 98 :)
[04:49] <cprofitt> http://edcommunity.apple.com/ali/story.php?itemID=9671
[04:50] <cprofitt> curious what you make of that program from Apple -- do you think something similar would aid awareness?
[04:50] <cprofitt> I actually have experience with Windows all the way up to the current version...
[04:50] <sbalneav> "community" things like that I know nothing about.
[04:51] <sbalneav> I concentrate mainly on the code.
[04:52]  * cprofitt nods
[06:04] <cprofitt> night all
[16:35] <Ahmuck-Jr> sbalneav:
[17:56] <cprofitt> hello nixternal, stgraber pleia2 and others
[23:07] <Ahmuck-Jr> sbalneav: ... firefox and flash works
[23:07] <Ahmuck-Jr> albiet, flash is clunky.  but i've dropped back to 500mhz and 256mb ram
[23:07] <Ahmuck-Jr> sound is shot however
[23:26] <surfpay> meh