terminal servers

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

At ALS several of us talked to guys doing terminal server stuff
(http://www.ltsp.org). They pointed out:

 a) it's a big deal to be able to do terminal servers, because
    this is what makes Linux a cheap desktop; cf. KDE in Largo, 
    Florida
 b) GNOME is relatively easy to fix for this environment
 c) this could make a big difference in adoption

A terminal server basically means you have a bunch of thin clients
that simply run the X server, and a central machine with tons of RAM
that has all home directories and runs the desktop and applications,
displaying on the remote X servers. This is a relatively easy remote
setup, we aren't dealing with e.g. using the same home directory from
two machines; all apps are running on the same server.

Here are the problems we need to address to work well:
 
 - right now, logging in twice from different terminals blows 
   up the desktop, because .gnome files lack locking. 
   fixed automatically by port to GConf, but we have to port 
   to GConf to get the fix.

 - Nautilus doesn't properly register itself per-display or something,
   so trying to start it on a second terminal results in displaying a
   new window on first terminal

 - as a start, we could at least cope with the above by refusing 
   to log in a second time (gnome-session could hold a lockfile
   perhaps). But it'd be nice to actually work with two logins at 
   once.

 - we need to be able to lock down settings so users don't mess it
   up. GConf already supports locking settings, but apps need to
   handle it correctly using the key_is_writable() call to turn off
   the prefs dialog. Also, we probably need a global
   lock_everything_down setting to cover stuff not in GConf.

 - of course we need to work on remote displays, but that already
   works (for the all-apps-on-same-machine case anyway), we just 
   can't break it

I think GConf lets us have a really excellent solution in this area,
if we can get it all working, so it could give us an edge.

The guys at ALS suggested that it would be a good idea for hackers to
set up a cheap $200 remote terminal box just so we'll notice when
stuff breaks. It's cheap, it's handy to keep your web browser open on
anyway, and if we aren't trying to use GNOME this way we won't notice
if it doesn't work.

Havoc
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