Extensive Status of Linux Terminal Server Deployment at Mid-Pacific Institute

Warren Togami warren at togami.com
Sat Nov 24 00:39:45 PST 2001


Hi folks, sorry I haven't been very active lately.  Next e-mail will be
my status regarding ITEC.

The Linux Terminal Server and 22 thin clients are now installed at
Mid-Pacific Institute.  I had several issues some of which are now
resolved.

RESOLVED ISSUES
---------------
1) XKB Missing
Backspace key was broken.  Eventually figured out the XKB files were
missing from the XTerminals toolkit installation.  Copied
/usr/lib/X11/xkb from the server to client NFS mount, and the keyboard
now works 100%.
(Server Red Hat 7.2.  xtermkit-2.7-1.  Client Red Hat 7.1)

2) Strange Network & X Behavior
X was unstable and unusable on two clients.  Problem was a typo in
/etc/dhcpd.conf.  Two machines were inadvertently given the same IP
address.  It was very strange that both clients with the same IP address
would successfully login via XDMCP and work for several minutes before
bombing out (simultaneously).  I'll eventually use a PHP & MySQL based
interface to simplify DHCPd configuration (80% written in a previous
project).

3) Resource Limits
I ran preliminary load tests booting all clients, each client running
multiple random desktop applications.  Each client was also running some
kind of animated program to increase bandwidth load.  CPU usage was
thankfully low, and bandwidth utilization kept below 40% of theoretical
max for the 100Mbit interfaces.  Suddenly, stuff started crashing for no
apparent reason.  --  Upon closer inspection I ran out of file
descriptors.  I doubled the number in /proc/sys/fs/file-max and made it
permanent with a line added to rc.local.  I should probably further
increase that number.  Anyone know what are the other system resource
limits and how I can adjust them?

4) Retarded Sun Microsystem Software Design
Charles hacked a shell script to automatically copy a StarOffice 6.0
user configuration template to new users who do not have one.  I really
wonder why Sun Microsystems insists on keeping the absolutely retarded
user profile config method that came from StarDivison.  Anyway, thanks
to Charles' script it should work "transparently" as far as the users
are concerned.
(Charles modified the soffice script that came in xtermkit-2.7-1 to work
with StarOffice 6.0beta, although it still has a few bugs.)


IMPOSSIBLY BROKEN ISSUES
------------------------
1) Retarded Macromedia Software Engineers
The Macromedia Flash plugin is horribly broken in Terminal Server
configurations.  It is a binary only Netscape 4.x plugin that is
horribly unstable on a standalone Linux machine, and completely unusable
in Linux Terminal Servers.  Some KDE mailing list posts describes it to
"corrupts nearby memory" whatever that means. -- There are apparently
two versions of the plugin to try.  One version is included in the
Netscape 4.78 packaged in Red Hat 7.2.  Strangely, Netscape 4.78 with
this included plugin works for the Linux thin clients, but Mozilla and
Konqueror do not.  The version of the plugin available on Macromedia's
site is completely broken in all browsers for Linux terminal servers.

If anyone has a few hours to blow during the day, please bug Macromedia
engineers to fix their stupid Linux plugin.  Over 90% of all web browser
issues in Linux are Flash related. =(

2) Clipboard & Select in KDE2
The clipboard system of KDE2 is absolutely retarded.  For those who know
the X select-and-middle-mouse-click system, select also overwrites the
clipboard.  This makes "cut & paste" in Linux behave completely wrong
from the perspective of end-users used to Windows and Mac (namely, ME
and the thousand end users at Mid-Pac).

http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/clipboards.txt
This URL explains the retardness of KDE2 (and to a small extent Gnome)
clipboard and select implementations.  Thankfully it is already fixed in
KDE3 slated for release in very early 2002.


ONGOING ISSUES
--------------
1) Japanese Input
Red Hat put a lot of work into including Chinese, Japanese and Korea
input in their latest 7.2 release, however I have found ZERO
DOCUMENTATION on the subject from Red Hat.  Horrible.

http://www.suse.de/~mfabian/suse-cjk/xim.html
http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/jpninpt.html
After some searching I finally found some useful documentation in
English that helped me figure out at least Japanese input.  Simply read
these two pages and you'll see that there's two methods of making
Japanese input with kinput2 actually work.

The global method is to set some environment variables and run kinput2
before the X desktop session is started, then kinput2 will work for all
programs in that session.  Unfortunately, the global method also changes
the locale of the operating system to Japanese, not something that I
want.  The other method is running kinput2, but only setting the
environment variables for the individual programs before they run.

Unfortunately, the individual program method seems to only work with
Netscape, Mozilla but not Konqueror.  Konqueror is so much nicer of a
browser when surfing Japanese sites.

Red Hat also has built in a convenient global method of changing the
locale for the entire system.  Simply edit /etc/sysconfig/i18n and
change en_US to jp_JP, and your X sessions will all work with kinput2. 
It would be *really* nice if they would document this somewhere. =(

I should get this working in a transparent fashion for the end users
with some script hacking... but it appears that CJK support is very
lacking in Linux compared to Windows or MacOS. =(

I know a little Japanese, but I don't understand Chinese or Korean.  I
must eventually figure out a way to integrate all three langauges later
because changing the global locale setting in /etc/sysconfig/i18n will
not work in a mixed language environment.

2) Konqueror Japanese Fonts
Browsing Japanese sites is GORGEOUS in Konqueror.  Fonts look far nicer
than Netscape and Mozilla, and even Internet Explorer in Windows. 
However, if you try to input Japanese characters into HTML dialog boxes
with kinput2, the font is blank.  I think it is permanently stuck in
Courier font, unable to display other encodings and fonts within the
same HTML dialog box.  Netscape and Mozilla display a mix of English and
Japanese characters in these dialog boxes just fine.  I have no idea how
to fix this in Konqueror.  Help!

3) VirtualFS Installation
I still have to install VirtualFS, allowing the local floppy or CD-ROM
on the clients to work transparently from the user's perspective.  Does
anyone know how easily this can integrate with KDE's CD-ROM and Floppy
links on the desktop and file manager?  How can I guarantee that this
will avoid the server's CD-ROM and Floppy device?

I worry that end users will not understand /mnt/floppy, although the KDE
GUI interface seems very close to a MacOS model with respect to these
drive mounts, StarOffice does not share this File Open/Save interface.


Summary
-------
Flash is the most annoying issue.  I would be 1000% happier if Flash
were fixed once and for all.  Until Flash is fixed, I am forced to make
ugly ugly Netscape 4.78 the default browser for end-users.

Otherwise, I am just about ready to launch this Linux Thin Client
computer lab.  It will be used for Web browsing, Office applications,
and perhaps later HTML page editing, graphics editing and AP Computer
Science Java development.

Thanks again to the folks from the Hawaii Open Source Community who came
down to help install the cabling for the thin clients.  I hope that we
can come together again to make the ITEC convention Dec 5 and 6 a
success too.

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com
Mid-Pacific Linux User's Group
http://www.mplug.org



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