[Thinlinc-technical] Support for Ubuntu 14.10 in upcoming ThinLinc 4.3.0?

[Bernd Dammann]

On 10/29/14 9:51 AM, "Peter Astrand" <astrand at cendio.se> wrote:

>>> Do you see any major advantage with running 14.10 instead of 14.04?
>>>   It's only supported for 9 months anyway - until July 2015. That's
>>>   only 3 months after the planned ThinLinc 4.4 release. Compare
>>>   this with 14.04 LTS, which is supported until April 2019.
>
>> Well, we are a scientific organization requiring to work with the
>>latest versions of applications in different scientific fields. As
>>such we are switching mostly to all upcoming Ubuntu versions to work
>>with the latest brand versions of applications, tools and even modern
>>kernel versions. Keeping Ubuntu 14.04 LTS until 2019 (5 more years)
>>is no option since it will put our competitors into a better
>>situation. As such, always refraining to LTS variants of Ubuntu is no
>>option for us because using the latest versions of applications is
>>more important to us than not having to worry for a major update for
>>5 years.
>
>You don't need to wait 5 years. According to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS,
>"A new LTS version is released every 2 years." Thus, 16.04 LTS is only
>1.5 
>years away.
>
>It's a bit unfortunate that you need to upgrade the entire operating
>system and desktop in order to run the latest applications and tools, but
>I agree with you; if you really need "the latest of the latest", there's
>no perfect solution.
>
You could split your setup into a desktop part, and an application part.
We have done that for years, and this has given us a very stable
environment.  Connecting to our ThinLinc setup, only the desktop runs on
the TL servers - all applications get started on a cluster of Linux nodes,
with the display set to the user's TL session.  And the OS on the cluster
nodes doesn't need to be same as the one on the TL  nodes.  In fact, for
many years (until last year) our TL nodes were based on Solaris SPARC,
since we also had a tight integration with our Sun Ray setup - but all
user applications have been running on different flavours of Linux since
at least 2007.  

Other advantages are, that you can separate system maintenance that way,
and you keep the load on the TL servers to a minimum.  And if a user's
application slows down or crashes a node, it doesn't take down the desktop
sessions of N other users.

Regards,
Bernd

--
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