[Ltsp-discuss] Fat clients and Unity on Ubuntu 12.04

[Angus G. <gu...@pr...>]

Hi everyone,

I'm a long-time LTSP user and fan. I recently decided to upgrade
our work LTSP system to 12.04 LTS, especially enticed by promises of
improved fat clients in 5.3.

Unfortunately, things haven't gone that smoothly. I'm not sure if I'm
running what amounts to unsupported configuration, or if I'm just doing
something wrong...

This is all working from fresh-built fat client images, built with 
 ltsp-build-client --fat-client --arch <arch> --mirror <mirror>

... for both amd64 & i386 (same problems observed on both.)

Host system was dist-upgraded from a previous Ubuntu version.


* Logging into Unity ("Ubuntu session", aka the default session), Unity
fails to load. The desktop renders (I believe this is Nautilus) but no
Unity top menu or sidebar launcher. You get stuck with any
pre-existing desktop icons, and the Nautilus context menu.

.xsession-errors contents can be seen at
http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=J44kex4B
(that's the very first login attempt on a brand new user account, I get
the same symptoms on pre-existing accounts.)

Here's the output from pstree at this point[1]:
http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=5Uq9shdm

Unity runs fine if I boot this same machine from a 12.04 Live USB key
(and "/usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p" outputs all "yes" values.) I
also tested on a second Unity-supported machine (newer model) and got
the same results.



* Switching sessions to unity-2d (aka "Ubuntu 2D"), Unity 2D loads.

It works fine on new accounts, on any pre-existing account I found I
needed to delete the "~/.local/share/zeitgeist" directory before the
Launcher would work at all (search results were always empty for all
types of search, so you couldn't launch anything!) This is probably a
Zeitgeist issue not an LTSP issue, but I thought it was worth
mentioning just in case anyone else has come across it.


* There's a GNOME session option but it just pops up with "Failed to
load session 'gnome'". I'm guessing not all GNOME session packages are
installed by default? Any tips on how to get a GNOME fat client?
('apt-get install gnome' seemed like it might break other things.)


Any other tips? Should I open any bug reports? Is Unity simply not
supported with LTSP?

Thanks for any/all help,

Angus


[1] Gotten by setting a root password in the image and logging in via
VT1.