The Linux Terminal Server Project has released version 4.0 with major changes in the build environment intended to increase deployment flexibility.

Rather than working with binaries from various Linux distributions (mostly Red Hat 7.0) as in the past, the new LTSP includes its own complete build environment, the LTSP Build Environment (LBE). The LBE includes its own compilers, linkers and libraries including glibc in order to build uniformly on most any x86 system.

That means that administrators of LTSP networks will no longer have to build everything on one system, or on identical systems. Nor will they have to prepare build systems with specific versions of various tools. The LBE creates version-parity with the official LTSP build environment.

The trade-off comes in build times. If the LBE itself is built from source, compiling on a 2.5Ghz P4 can run close to 2 hours and require 1GB of free space. If a binary distribution of the LBE is used, compile times are halved.

The Linux Terminal Server Project is meant to enable the use of older computers, resource-limited systems, and other thin clients as diskless workstations that boot from a network server. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License, and is popular in Linux-oriented businesses, academic institutions, and embedded applications.

 
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