We’re all LTSP’ing on our summer holidays

And we managed to go LTSP’ing on our summer holidays without bumping into an old double-decker bus containing such characters as Cliff Richard and Una Stubbs…You may as well read on…

With the kind assistance of psand.net, Bristol Wireless’ mobile LTSP suite of ‘redundant’ laptops has seen lots of action on its summer holidays again this year, taking in the Global Village in Kent, the Big Green Gathering in Somerset and the Climate Action Camp in North Yorkshire.

The first stop on the LTSP itinerary was the Woodcraft Folk’s Global Village 2006, which took place between 29 July – 9 August 2006 at the Kent County Showground near Maidstone. Global Village 2006 was an international festival that brought some 4,000 young people aged 6-20 years and 1,000 adults together to live, work, learn, play, exchange ideas and have fun, at the same time creating a community of hope for a better world and future through global co-operation. The suite provided by Bristol Wireless consisted of 19 thin client laptops with PCMCIA network cards, a 24 port gigabit switch and the Acer Inspire laptop as the server. Sean Kenny’s pictures of setting up the LTSP suite at the Global Village can be viewed on Flickr.

Overlapping the trip to the Global Village was Bristol Wireless’ annual visit to the Big Green Gathering at West Harptree in Somerset from 2nd to 6th August. The kit – tents, caravans and satellite dish – was delivered to site on 29th July and was ready for the event’s opening, with the Sunday spent back in Bristol installing the boot scripts on the client laptops for the suite. Bristol Wireless agreed to turn up just 3 weeks before the event. Due to the overlap with the Global Village, Psand purchased a Dell Inspiron laptop (possibly with random combustion feature) to act as the server and a four port gigabit switch to handle network traffic. Being an environmentally-aware event, our equipment was, of course, sustainably powered. The clients used are Toshiba Satellite 220cs with the battery removed to conserve power, each fitted with 32 MB of RAM and a PCMCIA 100mb network card. The power supply is a Watson Power Mite switch mode. As regards power consumption, all 12 laptops drew a mere 24 W each, so the total requirement for the entire suite was 480 W (i.e. less than one modern desktop PC). The suite was open for use for 6 hours from 12 noon each day, starting with a free hours for kids. Besides providing site internet access and much-appreciated cider therapy (well, it was Somerset!), the BGG also gave Bristol Wireless an opportunity for some Linux advocacy; scores of CDs were given away featuring the latest release of SimplyMEPIS, which we install on our refurbished machines.

For the Climate Action Camp near Selby and Drax power station, Rich Higgs and Psand’s Mike Harris delivered the LTSP suite to site for equipping the Indymedia tent and got it up and running over the August Bank Holiday weekend. Psand’s website has some photos of the suite and kit in use.

Please contact info@bristolwireless.net if you’d like our LTSP suite to pay you a visit.