[NMLUG] lessdisks and sdm

[vagrant at freegeek.org (Vagrant Cascadian)]

> I'm curious, though.  What are sdm and lessdisks?  Google says something 
> about: flexible diskless xterminal system.  Is this one and the same 
> thing?   I'm advertising my ignorance here!
 
are diskless terminals and xterminals the same thing?  is that your
question? they aren't really the same thing, though many times they go
together.  an xterminal is merely a machine that runs X and connects to
an application server which actually runs all the applications.  a
diskless terminal is merely a machine which gets it's filesystem off of
the network.  they go together nicely, though some people have started
using lessdisks to run all applications locally.
 
lessdisks is merely an installation system to create and maintain a
debian chroot that can be exported over the network using NFS with a
read-only root filesystem.  it is a thin layer of additional scripts on
top of debian- i try to change as a little as possible from a standard
debian distribution to make it work as a read-only root filesystem.
this way you inherrit the possibility of installing any package
available for debian with security updates in the terminal's root
filesystem.  that's probably the big difference from other diskless
terminal distributions like LTSP- it's based entirely off of debian, as
opposed to it's own separate distribution.

in theory, lessdisks could be ported to some other distribution, but
it's currently pretty debian-centric (though some have installed a
debian-based lessdisks chroot on SuSE and mandrake, which didn't sound
hard to do).
 
sdm is a login manager, sort of like xdm, kdm and gdm.  it's most useful
for remote logins, and unlike the other dm's i know of(which all use
XDMCP for remote logins), sdm uses ssh for communication between the
terminal and the server.  it also makes it possible for remote automatic
login with ssh keys, and a simpler mechanism to log into any server with
ssh access (as opposed to the "chooser" from the other dm's).

hope that clears it up and sparks a little interest :)

live well,
  vagrant
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