In my continuing quest to learn more about Linux terminal servers, I tried out drakTermServ, a solution provided by Mandriva, a favorite desktop Linux distribution vendor.

drakTermServ seems promising. It uses a nice graphical wizard to set up a computer as a terminal server. Distinctive features include generating kernels and boot files for the clients based on the server, and using clusternfs as a novel way for clients to make customizations.

All that promise sucked me in for several hours before I concluded that drakTermServ really fails to deliver the basics (I never got it working), and is likely a dead-end project.

These statistics I gather after the fact provide a clue to the energy being invested in drakTermServ versus LTSP:

So there are currently about 2000 times more pages about LTSP than about drakTermServ. It shouldn't be surprising that it seemed like a needle in the haystack each time a found a new page with drakTermServ documentation.

drakTermServ is also just a buggy program. Once it silently changed my input. Another time it seemed to quietly delete some data I entered altogether. (It also includes one of those interfaces that looks it was designed by a programmer. Like requiring you to press a button labeled "Add/Del" when you actually want to Edit something.)

While I would like to see Mandriva offer an integrated terminal server offering, I don't think this should be it. A wiser path would be to follow in the footsteps of Edubuntu and integrate directly with LTSP instead. That will given them a proven, well-documented solution which already runs on Mandriva as a foundation.