[Tech] GUI - or not - on PXE/proxy/NFS server? (how 'bout installed but not launched by default)

Elizabeth K. Joseph lyz at partimus.org
Thu Jun 18 17:48:25 PDT 2015


On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 5:24 PM, Michael Paoli
<Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I'd think it best, to best approximately meet both goals:
> * Don't need no steenkin' gewey on 'da server
> * eases many things to have the server as relatively similar to its build
>   targets as feasible (same distribution and architecture, etc.)
>
> Have the server be Lubuntu 14.04.x i386, and with the GUI and its
> software installed (per Lubuntu defaults) ... but just configure it
> so that by default that GUI stuff doesn't fire up upon (re)boot, but
> can be launched manually if/when desired.
>
> That keeps it relatively similar to the build targets, and keeps most of
> the overhead of the GUI out of the way - and that's more a concern for
> RAM and CPU, and not so much for disk space, as the server, also being
> caching proxy and install server, will generally have those software
> packages at least somewhere on the host, and should have ample drive
> capacity - so storage of the installed GUI stuff isn't really much of
> a drive space concern for the server host.
>
> Sound like a (general) plan?  Any objections or other thoughts on that?

That makes sense, thanks for explaining your rationale :)

The only thing worth noting is that Lubuntu's LTS only lasts for 3
years, where Ubuntu (server and desktop) last 5 years. So we'll need
to make sure the server is upgraded every 3 years along with the
clients on the network. Not a big deal, since we may very well be
making other changes in the next couple of years, but something we'll
want to keep in mind.

I'm going out of town for the weekend tomorrow, but I plan on making
some time next week to go through the work that Tai, Mike Rojas (who
did a Clonezilla demo at EBLUG) and others have put in here to see
where I can pitch in and see how we can move things along. Since we
all have limited time to work on this, I think a task list to define
precisely what we have and what we're missing would be valuable to
everyone.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2
http://www.partimus.org


More information about the Tech mailing list