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

[Kevin Kwan (Work)]

Or you can just run Debian testing.  Then you have a choice to chase the
bleeding edge (python 3.3, 2.7, gcc versions from 4.4 to 4.9, either a
homegrown kernel or their 3.1/3.2/3.8/3.9/3.12/3.16 flavors, systemd or
sysvinit) or keep things sane and static.  

I actually set the repos at the desktops to bind to specific dates via
snapshots.debian.org depending on which type of users I am dealing with
(traders need stability so they are pinned to a date 8 months back, and I
drop more pins), devs need leeway (they get a later repo date, less pins but
rollback ability just in case), execs need OSX) and drop package pin-downs
to keep overzealous users from dist-upgrading their machines beyond my
capacity to support it in a sane fashion.  Of course, I also run a large
pool of VMs and host the homedir on NFS off shared storage to support a
relatively small group of people, so if they nuke a VM I can always tell
them to log into another one and start from scratch.


Kevin Kwan
Senior Systems Administrator
World Financial Desk, LLC 
Tel 212 937 4025 • Fax 212 202 9600  • Mobile 646 964 7828 / 347 714 0983
 
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-----Original Message-----
From: thinlinc-technical-bounces at lists.cendio.se
[mailto:thinlinc-technical-bounces at lists.cendio.se] On Behalf Of Bernd
Dammann
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2014 5:04 AM
To: Peter Astrand; Jens Maus
Cc: thinlinc-technical at lists.cendio.se
Subject: Re: [Thinlinc-technical] Support for Ubuntu 14.10 in upcoming
ThinLinc 4.3.0?

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

--
# Bernd Dammann           <beda at dtu.dk>  | "Why stop now,
# DTU Compute                            |       just when I am hating it?"
# Technical University of Denmark        |
# Richard Petersens Plads, Building 324  | phone: (+45) 45 25 33 71
# DK-2800 Kongens Lyngby, Denmark        | http://www.compute.dtu.dk/~beda/
   print unpack("u", "<22!K;F5W('1H870@>6]U)VQL(&1O('1H870A\"@``" );

# Please note:
# DTU Informatics and DTU Mathematics merged on  January 1, 2013 into # "DTU
Compute. Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science"



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