…get things wrong when they don’t read the provided documentation. I’ve been browsing the Slashdot comments on Stateless Linux and it cracks me up to see comments like “Doesn’t LTSP do this?” and “We have had NFS mounted roots forever now”. For the most part the people who have read the PDF understood what Stateless is trying to achive. If perminent state is no longer kept on the client but mearly cached there it gives us the ability to do things like take a generic laptop off the shelf and sync it with a user’s image. This allows the moving around of physical hardware without loss of data such as a user getting an upgraded computer without having to reconstruct their desktop. Also, since a users state is cached they can work disconnected from a network and plug back in to resync the cache to the servers.

In my view of the Linux landscape this is not the only benifits that Stateless brings to us. Where the power really lies and where normal users will see the benifts without ever setting up a stateless network, is the development mentality that is needed to make the stateless architecture work. Since there is no root state any configuration done as root is lost every time the machine reboots. Because of this it forces the developers to look at problems such as configuration of hardware devices in a different light. Sateless forces us to be dynamic and flexable. If hardware is plugged in it has to Just Worktm. This is why in previous blogs I had mentioned my work on a print dialog that no one should ever see. Things are not perfect yet so the dialog is still required (which saves state via user gconf keys removing the need for a root password) but at least Stateless pushes us into thinking about these issues and trying to find solutions to them.

So while stateless itself is geared mainly twords buisnesses with large desktop deployments, in the end the focus on solving the problems of a subset of our user base ends up solving the problems of the entire user base.

Just Works is not a real trademark but should be the mantra of the Linux Desktop effort. Why? Because if it Just Works, then we all can go on doing what we do ;-)

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J5

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