monline

LTSP was originally made for netbooting "thin" clients from where users log on to terminal servers and all the actual work was done on the server. This approach has the advantage that the clients can be really thin (low-power CPUs without active cooling -ie. fans-, etc. ... at least compared to high-end desktop PCs) and thus easily managable, and since the client does not necessarily have to have any moving parts, it can have a lot higher MTTF. However graphics intensive applications (like video editing, full-screen video playback, gaming, etc.) are not feasable via LTSP's thin client solution. The solution in this case is to have a full desktop linux on the clients, but to make life (ie. the system administrators' life ) a lot easier, these "fat" clients should netboot too. LTSP's chroot building framework is of great help in achieving our goal.

The linked page in Ubuntu's Wiki describes step-by-step how to do this: there's a script that is told to be able to do all the necessary work for us, but the page also contains detailed instructions on how to do it manually.

Actually LTSP already contains an initiative for supporting fat clients ... it's called LocalApps (or something like that). Sooner or later this will become part of LTSP's core. Until that happens you've to RTFM.