Announcing LDM 2.2 and LTSP 5.2.5

Today, I’m pleased to announce the release of both LTSP 5.2.5 and LDM 2.2.

Quite a lot of changes went in over the past few months, 25 commits since the last ltsp release and 82 for ldm.
Here’s a quick overview of what’s new.

Big LDM refactoring and cleanup

Almost a year ago, my company got some funding from the NLNet foundation to work on a few LTSP and LTSP-Cluster related projects. One of them was to make LDM extensible, moving it to a plugin infrastructure and making it’s interface a bit more flexible.

I’m glad to announce that all of that work landed upstream almost two months ago and since then has been cleaned up and tested.
From a user experience point of view, the only noticeable change should be that the same login screen can now be used for Linux (ssh), Windows (rdp) login and for fat clients.

From a sysadmin/developer point of view, a lot changed:

• Support for multiple backends. The old SSH backend as been ported to the plugin infrastructure and an RDP plugin has been written. A pam/libssh plugin should soon replace the current SSH plugin
• Switched to using multiple windows and a window manager instead of our old fullscreen window. It should make it a lot easier to add more widgets to the login screen.
• New logging functions with different logging levels and standardized logging output with syslog support

Remote apps support

It’s now been a few years since we have local applications supported in LTSP. It’s greatly improved over the years to get to what we currently have in LTSP.
The biggest issue of it was that if you start a software like firefox as a localapp and click on a .pdf/.odt/… document in it, it won’t be able to open them unless the required viewer is also a localapp.

That’s now been fixed thanks to the work done by Marc Gariépy and Gideon Romm during the last LTSP hackfest in Southwest Harbor, ME.
ltsp-remoteapps is a new command that can be assigned to mimetypes on the thin client and will open the viewer on the application server.

For the user, this means that if they click on a .odt document in their local firefox, it’ll now automatically open it in OpenOffice Writer on the application server.
Giving the desktop-like experience that was missing for local applications.

Other than these two big changes, we had our usual set of bug fixes, cleanup and translation updates.

Packages for Ubuntu Natty are already available and a backport for Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) is available in my PPA: https://launchpad.net/~stgraber/+archive/ppa