i.MX515 Project
Ubuntu LTSP on ARMin category Applications & Software
proposed by stgraber on 18th September 2010 (accepted on 26th September 2010)
Project Summary
LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) is a set of components and Linux distribution integration to transform any regular Linux distribution (currently Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and Gentoo) into a terminal server.Thin clients boot from the network (on x86, using PXE), get a minimal kernel and initrd, then mount their "harddisk" using NBD. At this point, they run a minimal version of the server's distribution to load basic hardware support and an X server.
The user then logs in using LDM (LTSP's display manager) which then starts an actual desktop session (mostly gnome) on the server and remove displays either over plain X11 or with X11 in SSH.
The project, would be to test and fix the use of the existing ARM port of Ubuntu on thin clients. The part requiring the most work would probably be having some PXE-like boot process that'd work as-is on a regular LTSP network, then making sure other features work as expected (X, sound support, external devices).
Recent LTSP (like the one shipped in Ubuntu) is also capable of booting a thin client as a "fat" system where all applications run on the local CPU by default, requiring them to be installed in the "chroot". Then depending on conditions determined at boot time, a thin client will either run everything remotely, everything locally or a mix of both.
ARM is probably one of the most interesting architecture for LTSP mostly because it's very low power and giving a very interesting performance/power ratio.
I'm the maintainer for LTSP in Ubuntu as well as an upstream developer for LTSP and the project leader for LTSP-Cluster which is used for large scale deployments of thin clients.
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