Differences when using it with thin clients

Introduction

Very recently, ControlAula has support to work in a thin clients environment using the LTSP project configuration. Due to the special caracteristics of such environment, there are some inherent differences between this kind of environment and an average workstations lab.
There are also limitations, some of them will be removed in the future, but today they are still here

Limitations
Differences

Limitations

There are two main limitations:

Teacher desktop has to be the ltsp server for the classroom. This is going to change in the future, allowing any ltsp client to be the teacher desktop but, using controlaula today in a ltsp envirnoment will force this setup: if the teacher pc is not the ltsp server, the rest of the clients will not recognize him properly as a teacher.
Sharing & unsharing the printer does not work: the student will be able of using the printer if the teacher has a printer setup and the student is in the lp group.

Differences

Main differences are related to the way the application starts inside the ltsp clients, so this information is just for admins to know how the application behaves, but it's not useful for end users. Users (teachers and students) will work the same when using ControlAula in a thin client environment or in a workstation environment (with the exception of the above limitations).

Video broadcasting works the same in a thin client envirnoment. So, this sentence means that vlc client starts in the thin client chroot, and runs as a local application.
ControlAula adds a localapp skeleton that allows running applications locally in the thin client. This skeleton is fully included for iceweasel/firefox, but adding new applications to run like local applications is trivial.
If firefox is going to be run as a local application in the clients, a NAT setup must be set in the ltsp server, otherwise clients won't be able to access outside.
Keeping the ltsp server as the teacher desktop, a mixed environment (thin clients with full clients) will work, even if the computers are in different network segments.

Application manuals

Last modification on 27th May, 2008