Welcome¶
LTLJ stands for Linux Terminal Leisure Joyhub. This project aims to provide a full featured networked system to "drive" LAN parties.
Well the name and description are not very descriptive ;-) So let's take an example :
With an LTLJ server, you can have LAN parties with many games in a few click.
- Plug many terminal to a LTLJ server ;
- When powered up, terminal boots via PXE ;
- The choosen game is launched on each terminal and the party begins !
- Point a browser to the LTLJ web server and change the game with a few clicks ;
- All the terminals instantly switch to the new games ;
Biggest features are :
- No installation required on terminals : Games are streamed as needed ; "Deploying" 50 terminals is easy as deploying 5 :
- Full control of the party : Decide which game to play and "force" all players to do so ;
Community¶
LTLJ is a GPL licensed project. Development is driven and supported by Ph.E Conseil. If you want to be one of the happy few developers of this funny project, just drop me a mail.
We are also looking for gamers, event organizers or testers.
Feel free to contact us at info@ltlj.org.
Testing¶
A clean installation procedure is not eready yet.
We released a virtual machine disk image to allow testing LTLJ without pain ;-)
Technology¶
LTLJ is based on many Free softwares. The main ones are : Linux, Python, LTSP, Ubuntu, NBD, SSH.
Look at the detailed steps from a typical LTLJ session. There is also a reminder of usefull files and directories.
Supported server hardware¶
Unlike usual thin client architecture, LTLJ does not need a high-end server configuration. Power (and money) are mostly on client side.
- 2 NICs : One for the terminals network and one for Internet access ; Having a Gigabyte card for the terminal network can speed up games launching ; Only 1 NIC is possible but with less features ;
- At least 50 Gb of disk space : The compressed client image containing the games data can weight more than 10 Gb ; The image is build from a client source directory structure of a size greater than the image ; If you are tweaking the image, consider having 2 or 3 different images for testing ; So 50 Gb is a minimum ! Everything that can speed up read disk accesses are good : RAID 0, 1, 5, solid-state disk, ...
- RAM : Server should run with 1 Gb (or even less) but keep in mind that Linux will use available memory as cache for spreading terminal image ; So the more RAM you get the quicker the system will be ;
- CPU : A low-end CPU is enough since all game processing are done on terminals ; The server is mainly concerned by serving terminals image. But I you are building your own images, a good multi-core CPU can greatly decreased the time needed ;
All your server hardware must be supported by Linux. Recommended architecture is i386 (32 bits). You can run the server in 64 bits but be prepared for some headaches with 32/64 bits conflicts (Terminal must be 32 bits !).
Supported terminal hardware¶
Our terminals are "thin clients" because they don't need any storage devices (no hard drives, no CD/DVD drives, no USB stick).
But they need some "fat" features : A capable CPU, RAM and GPU for running games (or any desired applications).
We use PXE booting to start the terminals. Ensure the terminal BIOS includes PXE feature (present in all modern motherboard).
At this time we only support nVidia GPU (cf issue #3).
Supported games¶
Those games are known to work fine in LTLJ. They have been extensively played in several LAN parties :
- OpenArena
- Urban Terror
- World of Padman
- Wolfenstein Enemy Territory
- TeeWorlds
Please note that some of those games are not Libre. Refer to www.jeuvinux.net or www.happypenguin.org for descriptions and licensing details.