[1]For those of you not yet familiar with LTSP, it's the Linux Terminal Server Project which goal is to transform a regular workstation into a terminal server that can be used by thin clients. Thin clients are either old computers recycled as thin clients or specialized minimal computers (usually disk less and without moving parts) that are used to boot off the network.
Localapps are finally there
Starting with Jaunty's LTSP one now has the possibility to choose which application will run on the server and which will run locally.
For these of you not living all day in LTSP's world, our issue was that these thin clients just weren't using their CPU, everything running on the server. In order to decrease the load on the servers and use the thin clients a bit more, we got the idea of running some of the softwares locally, showing them just like regular application (you usually can't tell which one are remote and which one are local). They can access the same files and settings as their remote equivalent could, making them from a user point of view almost identical to traditional remote applications (just a bit faster).
This is achieved using LTSP's localapps and a bit of XDG magic. Basically you can now install firefox in your LTSP chroot, set LOCAL_APPS_MENU to True in your lts.conf and here you go with your usual firefox running locally on your thin client. The XDG magic takes care of adding the application in the menu if this one isn't installed on the server and if it's already installed on the server, will tweak the launchers to start the localapp.
As a result you'll see a decreased CPU usage on the server and also spare a lot of bandwidth as you'll be accessing the content directly and rendering locally instead of getting the X11 stream directly.
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