Re: LTSP installation

[abo minkirri apana org au (Donovan Baarda)]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 10:07:45AM -0500, Chris Tooley wrote:
> I need to get syncing working for Palm users in an LTSP environment. 
> Does network syncing to gnome-pilot work and if so how would I go about
> starting.  I'm trying to get started by just visualizing in my head what
> parts I would need and where.

This is so unusual it almost rates as off-topic... except this is probably
one of the best places to ask :-)

The LTSP _usualy_ runs all aplications on the server, with the "Linux
Terminal" running as a simple X terminal. Things like gnome-pilot would
probably assume that the conduit is a local serial or USB port. This means
that gnome-pilot etc would work fine... provided you plugged your cradle
into the server, because that is where they would be actualy running. The
only problem in this scenario would be contention issues with heaps of
clients all trying to run gnome-pilot on the same cradle.

If you want cradles at the "linux terminals", then you will either need to
run gnome-pilot on the local terminal instead of on the server, or you might
be able to do a remote-device-hack similar to the existing LTSP floppy
access using the network block device stuff.

Running gnome-pilot on the local terminal instead of the server should be
possible, as the LTSP already has some support for running things like the
WM locally. It's been a while since I looked at it so I'm not sure of the
status of this... I think the contributed LDAP stuff was a good step
forwards for this. One thing to look out for is I'm not sure how happy the
GNOME desktop would be if bit's of it were running on different
machines...ie, running the gnome-pilot applet on the terminal, and the
pannel on the server. I _think_ GNOME's ORB based design should make this
OK, but I bet hardly anyone has tried it even if it is. You might find that
once you start running gnome-pilot on the terminal, you end up running most
of the gnome desktop on there as well.

Using a remote-device-hack could be easier, provided all the bits are
already there. This involves creating some sort of virtual device for the
gnome-pilot conduit on the server, and have this pipe data to/from the real
serial or USB port on the terminal. If gnome-pilot is fairly device-agnostic
and can happily communicate down any file-like object, you might be able to
find or rig up some sort of client/server to pipe the data to/from the
terminal. If gnome-pilot does some jiggery that is device specific, then you
either need to hack gnome-pilot to be less fussy, or find/get a virtual
device driver to do the data forwarding for you. I know things like this
exist for forwarding ports to terminal servers, but I dunno if any of them
are free and/or flexible enough to be used for this. Perhaps the Network
Block Device could be used/hacked for the purpose?


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