ALT Linux 4.0 Terminal release notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The distribution comes in two ISO images: * altlinux-4.0.0-terminal-i586-en-cd.iso * altlinux-4.0.0-terminal-i586-ru-dvd.iso Both include Linux 2.6.18, KDE 3.5.9, OpenOffice 2.4.1.7, Firefox 2.0.0.16, accelerated drivers for common videocards and proper multimedia stack. CD version ---------- It's English-by-default[1] image suitable for 800M CD-R or any DVD media (we decided not to sacrifice OpenOffice.org for 700M, and if you find any unneeded packages worth ~60M of media space drop us a note). This version also contains plain SMP kernel which will boot just fine on 32-bit QEMU, KVM, VIA C3/C7, early Centrino CPUs and even on Pentium-grade hardware which should run better as a terminal but doesn't have PAE anyways. Additional software can be installed via Synaptic using ALT Linux 4.0 software repositories. DVD version ----------- It's Russian-by-default image suitable for DVD-recordable media which contains somewhat more optional package groups together with sizeable contrib directory and rescue boot target. This build WILL NOT run on CPUs lacking Intel PAE and may have trouble with emulated hardware since it contains a kernel which utilizes that; it's the price to pay for the ability to use 4G RAM or more on a 32-bit system. Common ------ You should let eth0 be set up as 192.168.0.1/24: LTSP-related services require coordinated changes and performing these is not trivial in general case. As integrating a network boot server (which ALT Linux Terminal is indeed) into an existing LAN does require some sophisticated knowledge anyways and commonly-recognized upstream-recommended default LTSP setup is "one NIC for LAN/WAN, another one for a terminal network" and a server should have at least one Ethernet interface, we preset eth0 this way so you can add second Ethernet and set eth1 up to access wider LAN or WAN. It is also recommended to run the system, or at least /home, on hardware or software RAID1/10. Please avoid RAID5 here due to high disk strain and access latency during concurrent writes. Otherwise, running 24 KDE+Firefox sessions is known to consume roughly 1100M RAM; adding another OpenOffice.org will bring that to 1200M. Overall it's pretty modest and bearable for modern dual/quad core desktop or entry level server. In case your terminals don't do PXE (or the Intel NIC firmware is broken), there's a small ISO image generated in /opt which should be able to boot them over the network (one CD-R suffices to boot as many systems as needed). Local media should be accessible in a terminal session. Local sound chip should work too provided that applications access it via ALSA (which is set up to use PA to forward the playback to thin client). NB: kmix is known to be broken regarding networked mixer, please use alsamixer in konsole/xterm as a workaround if needed. You can find more documentation at http://www.ltsp.org, and contact us via mailing list: https://lists.altlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/ltsp-server Welcome! Footnotes --------- [1] There's a known issue: graphical boot screen of any installed system is hardwired to be in Russian by default; language can be switched using F2, and we're working on it. ALT-specific documentation on the disk is currently only available in Russian, too; we're considering translations still it's a sheer amount of work.