Re: Questions on running GNOME over LTSP

[Jérôme Warnier <jwarnier beeznest net>]

Le ven 18/06/2004 à 16:47, Sayamindu Dasgupta a écrit :
> Hello all,
> We are trying to implement a LTSP setup for some local schools
> (madrasah[1] for girls), and currently we are in the testing phase. 
> 
> Recently, some of out testers were complaining that the icons on their
> desktops were looking weird (just a blank paper), and after some
> investigation, I found that those testers, instead of logging out, were
> simply powering off their terminals. As a result, gnome-settings-daemon
> and a few other stuff kept on running at the server, and when they
> relogged in, their desktop icons were borked.
Are you sure this is related to their bad login off?
It used to happen recently on Sarge when GNOME 2.6 went incomplete in
it. What Debian version are you using? Is it up-to-date?

> Is there any way to avoid this (maybe some kind of time out value or
> something for gnome-settings-daemon and friends)??
> Of course, one can simply ask the users *not* to switch off their
> terminals like that, but the places where the actual thing is going to
> be implemented have frequent power cuts, and I don't think we will be
> able to have UPS-es, etc for the terminals. In case of power cuts, we
> will be facing similar issues. And at least in the initial stages, it
> would be a bit too much to expect the teachers/instructors (who are not
> very well acquainted with computers, especially *nix like systems)  to
> grep through ps and kill the running processes by hand :-S
> .
I've found using the Auto Nice Daemon (AND) was really useful. Probably
you could configure it the way you want to do what you want.
In case you need it, I put a more recent (unofficial) version of the
Debian package here: http://apt.bxlug.be/sarge/not-debian/
You can use it as an apt repository by adding this line to your
sources.list:
deb http://apt.bxlug.be/sarge/ not-debian/

> Any help in this area will be highly appreciated.
Hope it helps.

BTW, I'm co-autor of a competitor to LTSP, entirely based on Debian and
named Plume (http://plume.bxlug.be). If you'd like to join the team,
you're welcome, as we don't work much on the project because it now
basically does what we wanted, but look eagerly to improve it.

> -thanks-
> -sdg-
> 
> 
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrasah
-- 
Jérôme Warnier
Consultant
BeezNest
http://beeznest.net