Hi folks,
Welcome to my new blog. The aim of this blog is to record the progress of a project I am involved with which aims to help bridge the digital divide and get computer suites based on Linux into small Community Centres in the Devon & Cornwall area.
Now some of you reading this may be wondering what Linux is, well rather try and explain what it is, it might be a good idea for you to check out the rather good articles here.
Now there have been a few discussions on the Devon & Cornwall GNU/Linux User Group mailing list about suitable locations where the members can meet up, discuss things to do with Linux and Free Software and optionally hold talks, demonstrations and install days. Now during the discussions ideas have been chucked around about helping provide computers running Linux to local community centres and other organisations. Part of the aims of this is to provide access to the Internet and e-mail to visitors of these centres, promote the use and benefits of Free and Open Source Software and to make use old older machines that normally would end up in land fill.
So, watch this space for more information about the current project which is starting to take shape and further posts about how we got to this point.
Saturday 27 October 2007
Proof of concept testing
Okay, so since my last post a couple of hours ago I've been having a play around with the client machines I have waiting to be deployed.
We're hoping to base the machines on the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP). Using LTSP enables us to take old machines which are too old to be used as standalone machines and give them a new lease of life. The old machines act as 'dumb terminals' which relay keyboard and mouse commands to a server and display an output on the screen. The server (or servers) do all the processing and have to be a bit faster. They run the applications such as the web browser, e-mail client and office suite, take commands from the clients, process them and then send the results back to the clients.
As I didn't have a spare machine which I could use as a server I decided to install the LTSP software on a spare laptop. The laptop is a fairly reasonable machine with a 1.8GHz Pentium M processor and 1GB of ram running Ubuntu Linux 7.04. It would be similar to the sort of laptop you could pick up for about £350.
We're hoping to base the machines on the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP). Using LTSP enables us to take old machines which are too old to be used as standalone machines and give them a new lease of life. The old machines act as 'dumb terminals' which relay keyboard and mouse commands to a server and display an output on the screen. The server (or servers) do all the processing and have to be a bit faster. They run the applications such as the web browser, e-mail client and office suite, take commands from the clients, process them and then send the results back to the clients.
The Server
As I didn't have a spare machine which I could use as a server I decided to install the LTSP software on a spare laptop. The laptop is a fairly reasonable machine with a 1.8GHz Pentium M processor and 1GB of ram running Ubuntu Linux 7.04. It would be similar to the sort of laptop you could pick up for about £350.
The Client
The client machine was one of 15 machines which were kindly donated by one of the members of the Devon & Cornwall Linux User Group. The machine appears to be about 7 years old and not really up to the job of running the latest and greatest software. It has an AMD K6/2 processor running at 450MHz (wow, I remember when they were the bees knees) with 256MB memory, a 10GB hard drive and a 100Mbit network card.
The client machine was one of 15 machines which were kindly donated by one of the members of the Devon & Cornwall Linux User Group. The machine appears to be about 7 years old and not really up to the job of running the latest and greatest software. It has an AMD K6/2 processor running at 450MHz (wow, I remember when they were the bees knees) with 256MB memory, a 10GB hard drive and a 100Mbit network card.
Setting it all up and booting up
Since the client runs completely over the network, it's hard drive is fairly redundant. I did however make use of it to boot the machine up. To get it to boot, I downloaded a customised version of Etherboot from the Rom-O-Matic site. Etherboot allows the machine to boot from the network and is really handy if you don't have an up to date machine which supports network booting out of the box. Once Etherboot was installed (on the internal hard drive due to not having any blank floppy disks), it finally started to boot up.
The actual boot process took about 30 seconds. I was greeted with a slightly pale Ubuntu logon screen. I was then able to login and everything from then on was running on the laptop.
Using the client is pretty much like using a normal machine except if it hasn't got any fans it is much quieter. I did find that most tasks like web browsing, e-mail and Open Office worked fine with no major slowdown. I then went on to try something which I didn't expect to work - video playback.
I was actually surprised that video playback did work. It seemed a little bit slower than normal although without any sound I couldn't really confirm that. Now this was one machine attached to another machine so it's possible that with 10 machines all running on the server it might not cope so well.
My last test before shutting down for the evening was Flash. I fired up the Badger Badger Badger website. Unfortunately the client and the server didn't like it one bit. The playback was choppy and fairly unresponsive. The client machine couldn't keep up with re-drawing the screen so quickly and I don't think the server coped too well either.
So, it's a promising start. I've managed to get one client and server running to make sure the machines I have are going to work. The next step will be testing the rest of the machines to make sure they're all okay and seeing if a quicker client machine makes any difference.
Well that's all for now. Check back soon for more.
The actual boot process took about 30 seconds. I was greeted with a slightly pale Ubuntu logon screen. I was then able to login and everything from then on was running on the laptop.
Using the client is pretty much like using a normal machine except if it hasn't got any fans it is much quieter. I did find that most tasks like web browsing, e-mail and Open Office worked fine with no major slowdown. I then went on to try something which I didn't expect to work - video playback.
I was actually surprised that video playback did work. It seemed a little bit slower than normal although without any sound I couldn't really confirm that. Now this was one machine attached to another machine so it's possible that with 10 machines all running on the server it might not cope so well.
My last test before shutting down for the evening was Flash. I fired up the Badger Badger Badger website. Unfortunately the client and the server didn't like it one bit. The playback was choppy and fairly unresponsive. The client machine couldn't keep up with re-drawing the screen so quickly and I don't think the server coped too well either.
So, it's a promising start. I've managed to get one client and server running to make sure the machines I have are going to work. The next step will be testing the rest of the machines to make sure they're all okay and seeing if a quicker client machine makes any difference.
Well that's all for now. Check back soon for more.
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