[sugar] Greetings from New Hampsire

[David Van Assche]

Hi Brendan,

If you are using LTSP as your thin client technology, the majority of
your issues have already been taken care of. These include:
- collaboration via ejabberd.
- home folders stored on server so backups are just a server side
script (rsync.)
- activities can be installed through browse in the regular way (only
an admin can do that) and can be added removed as you wish, thereby
populating the program list. Unless u mean individual programs for
different users, in which case you'd probably need to virtualise sugar
somehow or create custom chroots for it.
- file server is not needed since you are in effect already storing
everything on the server.
- mounting local media (this is part of the underlying LTSP technology
and has been available to all LTSP distributions for several years
now. That means, usb, cdrom, hard drive, local printer, bluetooth, and
sound are all working for all LTSPed distros, including for sugar.

These issues are relatively straight forward to fix:
- printing should be an easy task to tackle, and just requires a
connection to cupsys (this is really up to the programs to support
this.)
- logout instead of exit (apart from the design change of the button)
- one simply needs to replicate the action of alt+cntrl+backspace
which exits the client with no hanging processes.
- Running just some sugar apps, or just one sugar app and not the
whole thing seems a little like a waste of time since its very fast
loading up and you need the underlying core anyway. I see no
significant gains by launching just one app on top of sugar instead of
all of it. However... you can do this with local apps, which is a
plugin for LTSP that allows you to install whichever program you like
directly into the thin client cpu and ram space, so it doesn't burden
the server (useful for heavy apps like firefox+flash, video editting,
blender, etc.