• ltspcfg
  We are drastically changing the way LTSP is installed. That is, we are separating the "installing" of the LTSP tree from the "configuring" of the services on the server.

  This will make it easier to install LTSP on any version of any distro. The actual installing is simply a matter of unpacking the tree in the right place. Either from a tarball, and RPM, a DEB package or whatever.

  The "configurating" can either be done manually, or by using a new tool called ltspcfg.

  This new utility has the logic built in to figure out how to enable the various servers, such as DHCP, TFTP, NFS and XDMCP on the server. And, if it can't figure out how to enable the service, it will tell you, so that you can enable it manually.

  Gone are the days of seeing the message "Sorry This distro is not supported by LTSP"

  The getltscfg is not finished yet, but is very close.

• Screen scripts
  With previous versions of LTSP, the type of session to appear on the workstation was dictated by the 'RUNLEVEL' parameter in the lts.conf file. A runlevel of 5 would invoke a GUI interface. A runlevel of 4 would invoke a Telnet session, and runlevel 3 was for diagnostics mode. (Bash shell prompt).

  Now, the type of session can be selected for each virtually tty. That is, you could have 6 telnet sessions on vt1 - vt6. Or, you could have a couple telnet sessions and a GUI session. Or, with future add-ons, you could have things like local Rdesktop sessions (yes, that's plural) or SSH sessions or local X Window desktops. All of this is controlled by new parameters in the lts.conf file.

  Here's an example: <pre> SCREEN_01 = telnet 192.168.254.254 SCREEN_02 = remote_x </pre>

  One great thing about the screen scripts is that it is easy to create new screen scripts without hacking any of the core ltsp code. They just drop into the ${LTSP_ROOT}/etc/screen.d directory and are then available to the lts.conf file.

• getltscfg has been rewritten
  getltscfg is the program that reads the lts.conf file. It has been rewritten using bison and flex. This makes the parsing faster, and gives us greater flexibility in the syntax. We now have a 'LIKE' keyword that will allow sections to inherit the settings from other sections.

  Here is an example where you have several HP Vectras and several Dell Dimension PCs that you are using: <pre> [Vectra] X_MOUSE_DEVICE = /dev/ttyS0 X_MOUSE_PROTOCOL = Microsoft [Dimension] X_MOUSE_DEVICE = /dev/psaux X_MOUSE_PROTOCOL = IMPS/2 [ws001] LIKE = Vectra [ws002] LIKE = Vectra [ws003] LIKE = Vectra [ws004] LIKE = Dimension [ws005] LIKE = Dimension PRINTER_0_DEVICE = /dev/ttyS1 PRINTER_0_TYPE = S [ws006] LIKE = Dimension </pre> Notice that ws005 inherits from Dimension, but also includes a local printer.

• Source code
  Source code is now available for all of LTSP.

• LBE - The LTSP Build Environment
  A complete build environment, allowing easier building of local applications.

To Do list for LTSP-4.0

• When building the LTSP sources, many of the packages are producing MAN pages and other extra things that simply aren't needed for LTSP. We need a way to either NOT produce the docs, or delete them after the fact.

• For doing GUI X Windows sessions, the build_x4_cfg script has been written, for XFree86 4.2.x, but we still need a build_x3_cfg script for building config files for XFree86 3.3.6.

• Packaging. Currently, the LBE and LTSP Source code is only available in tar packages. We need to build real RPMS, DEBS and we might as well do Gentoo ebuild packages.

• More screen scripts. Currently we only have 'remote_x' and 'telnet'. The 'remote_x' script is for launching the X server and connecting to the LTSP server. The 'telnet' script is for launching telnet and connecting to a server with a character mode session.

• The LTSP source package doesn't include the kernel sources yet. We need to be able to build the initrd and the kernels using the same tools as the rest of LTSP.

• Updated documentation.

• Probably a bunch more, but it's late, and i'm tired :)