The first LTSP distro for UDOO has been shown this Saturday at Open Source Day 2014 – where were you?

Well, you should have been there with us, we told you. But you chose not to come, and now you are wondering, how is it possible on earth that I miss a single UDOO event and this happens?

Some of you surely know the meaning of LTSP: Linux Terminal Server Project. There are yet LTSP for Raspberry Pi, but with UDOO you would be able to run Android and have a perfectly integrated Arduino! But what the hell is it? Well, it’s very simple: an Open Source terminal server for Linux that allows many people to use the same computer contemporary. An app runs on the server and handles all the I/O. Client computers, known also as thin clients or X-terminals, frequently are low-powered, lack a hard disk and are quieter and more reliable that desktop computers because they do not have any moving part.

Ok, we took the definition from Wikipedia – because we love Wikipedia, and you should too – it’s even Open Source!

By the way, this Saturday we were at the Polo Scientifico Rizzi of the University of Udine, where there were two Lightning Talks conferences held by the UDOO staff and one by Luca Peresson, professor of the Istituto Malignani of Udine, one of the high schools we support in the roadmap to democratize the computer science and Internet of Things access in schools – apropos: are u teacher or a student driven by passion for IoT and want to bring the Prometheus flame of knowledge to your peers? Contact us, we usually work with schools: here is one case study and here’s another one.

Luca Peresson has developed with our support this new Linux distro that is used at the Istituto Malignani by circa 20 computers to simultaneously use the same server computer. Practically, u just need a modern PC or singleboard computer, the other ones connected can come from the Pleistocene. In this specific case, the students have used 20 UDOOs with this UDOO distro for Linux as thin clients. They were connected through Ethernet with the server of the main UDOO, the one controlled by the Luca. This way the server practically lends all its computational-power to the UDOO clients.

Why shoud you use this solution instead of the normal way to do? Because if you are using the thin clients they can be really faster, as you can see in the video below.

You can have the super-uber-star trek computer you like as server, and thousands of UDOOs as clients, and all of them use the same server computer. As you can easily guess you’re going to save n thousands multiplied per PC-average-cost minus UDOO cost – that’s a great deal! And, not also, think at the environmental impact! Each UDOO consumes circa 5-7 Watt per hour, while an average PC consumes circa 70/100 Watt per hour.

Low-cost, low-consumption and for-everyone: these are our key words, these are the keywords of Luca Peresson.

Thus, if you are drooling like the Pavlov’s dog, stop dirty and return your tongue in the mouth: that was just an Alpha release, and still not perfectly stable – and there’s no ETA available, actually.