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A friend of mine got himself a new laptop for Xmas, quite a nice one at a good price and after a couple of months of running Windows XP on his 1.4Ghz (or something) on his CPU, he noticed things getting painfully slow.

His DVD playback was noticeably suffering with frames occasionally skipping and the sound constantly juddering.

After going through his Windows setup, I tried all the usual virus checks and spyware removal, then double checked for unnecessary running processes as well as running Disk Defragmenter and Scandisk in an attempt to get his Operating System speed back to what it was when new.

I get tired of Windows very quickly and after a good while of messing about, I suggested that maybe he should have a play around with a Linux based Operating system.

My friend knows how much I like everything that is Linux, so I suggested a Linux Distro that I had heard was the simplest and friendliest to use.

We decided to download Ubuntu and after burning it to a CDr, we then booted from it and were greeted by a ready to use Live Linux Operating System.

Ubuntu Live CD

As I currently use Gentoo and Debian Linux, I had always stayed away from Linux Distros geared for Newbies and Windows Converts but I was instantly very impressed with what Ubuntu had to offer from the Live CD alone.

Live CD’s are great for the first steps of trying out a Linux Distro without the need of installing to the hard drive and the Ubuntu one is no exception and comes with some great applications and system tools but only having 1 CD/DVD drive available on my friends laptop meant that he still couldn’t play DVD’s as most Live Distros need the CD constantly available.

A few days later, we decided to boot the Ubuntu Live CD once more and then click the ‘Install’ icon.

Installing Ubuntu

The installer even opened up a system tool for partition management that can resize Windows partitions, so we created a new partition for Linux at the end of the hard disk drive by making the Windows partition smaller.
(See: HowtoForge - perfect Ubuntu Desktop for full easy to follow instructions but please note that in the installation, we used ‘Manually edit partition table’ in the ‘Prepare disk space’ section)

Ubuntu Play Time

Both my friend and myself have really gotten into using Ubuntu on his laptop, it is indeed silky smooth and very simple to do pretty much everything for you - even installing and removing applications is just too easy.

It kind of got me wondering why I spend ages building Linux for my desktop machines and as Ubuntu is a Debian Linux based Distro, I knew that Ubuntu wouldn’t be as bloaty as I first imagined and seeing it running after the installation, I was impressed with how little of anything you have to do to it just to get a decent ready-to-use desktop setup.

My friend has now been converted to Linux and it seems I have been converted to Ubuntu.

Lose Gentoo - Install Ubuntu?

Well… Not quite!

Previously, gurgi-girl and myself had been using a diskless setup on our computers and we both shared the same read/write Gentoo Linux root stored on one of my servers for both of our Desktop machines.

In essence, our desktops were diskless clients that load their programs from a central server and run them on the client’s PC.

This was great because both of us had all the same software and it also made our Desktops very easy to maintain but really needs faster network speeds as sometimes applications can take a while to open depending how busy the network is.

I had been looking into the Linux Terminal Server Project as a thin client has no storage of its own, is easy to maintain, and can give the user a modern computing experience even with ancient hardware.

Thin clients are computers that load and run most of their programs from a central server, but are displayed on the thin client’s screen.
(see: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ThinClientHowto)

Then I noticed an Ubuntu LTSP Quick Install Howto and decided to give it a go.

Following the Howto, I entered two commands into the terminal and edited /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf, added gurgi and myself to the Ubuntu users list and rebooted.

Then I used our normal desktops PXE network boot to start our new Ubuntu thin clients and It worked 1st time.

Due to the pure ease of this setup and the time I have saved myself messing about with our existing Gentoo desktop root, we have decided that we really like our new LTSP-Ubuntu desktops.

Because of my recent experiments testing Xen on the cluster, I’m going to try and implement Gentoo and Debian with an Ubuntu LTSP server running on a Xen virtual machine with thin clients able to use Xen also.

I’m not sure If this would actually work well (if i get it working - I will post a Howto), but Ubuntu has given me new ideas for a complete cluster setup - making the most of Xen, Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu Linux Distributions.