[CentOS] Systemd Adding Its Own Console To Linux Systems

Tue Oct 14 19:34:46 UTC 2014
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 2:10 PM, Warren Young <warren at etr-usa.com> wrote:
>
>> But, I'm kind of surprised that someone hasn't done a raspberry-pi
>> type device that boots directly into x2go and comes out cheaper than a
>> video card per seat.  Haven't needed one badly enough to build it
>> myself yet.
>
> It should be trivial to set up an actual RPi to do that.
>
> One of the options during installation is to boot into text mode instead of graphical mode.  Once it’s booted, add the x2go startup commands in /etc/rc.local.
>
> Done, no?

Not really.  The beauty of the original K12LTSP respin was that just
you did a normal fill-in-the-form install pretty much like any
fedora/centos in a server with 2 NICs and you could plug in some
diskless PCs and they came up working with applications ready to go.
Compared to that, there's still a lot of do-it-yourself assembly
required.   I recall from the early K12LTSP mail list days that quite
a few teachers were able to set up a classroom with very little admin
knowledge.

> Any dedicated hardware to do that will be considerably more expensive than an RPi.
>
> First, the RPi benefits from massive scale.  They’ve moved millions of the things.  Dedicated x2go boxes will sell units on the scale of Wyse terminals, and consequently be relatively expensive.
>
> Second, the RPi is set up as a nonprofit educational foundation.  The last link or two in the chain does make a bit of money on it, but you aren’t paying for R&D or profit to the foundation.  And, the last links in the chain can’t make a *lot* of money on RPis because they’re competing against the foundation itself, which sets a ceiling on how expensive a Pi can be through their Element14 relationship.

Agreed on the hardware front, but couldn't this be a canned image you
copy to an SD card with some way to edit the target IP address in
place without needing to rebuild it?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com