Plume 0.7.0 review

Plume is a complete set of packages to create and administrate a network of diskless computers used as X terminals

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: J?r?me Warnier

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Plume is a complete set of packages to create and administrate a network of diskless computers used as X terminals. Stations root filesystem is extensively based on Debian with as few new packages as possible. It is clean and lean, as well as easy to understand and adapt if needed.

It is all about setting up easily a server with thin clients, each based on Debian. It is meant and known to be particularly light on the clients (ex.: it requires as few as 4MB RAM on a typical client) and run on commodity hardware.

Thin client [1]: A thin client is a computer (client) in client-server architecture networks which has little or no application logic, so it has to depend primarily on the central server for processing activities. The word "thin" refers to the small boot image which such clients typically require - perhaps no more than required to connect to a network and start up a graphical interface.

Plume is working fine at several places for a long time now (early year 2000), without much maintenance and without specialists needed when something is to be done. It has successfully and painlessly passed a migration from Potato to Woody on at least one server and from Woody to Sarge on at least one other server. As it is available as Debian packages (only sources on this site, though you can find binary packages on apt.bxlug.be), it should be a snap to install on any Debian machine out there.

It is meant first for schools, and as such fits well on really old PC (as little as 486 with 8MB RAM). It has been thought as a clean replacement of LTSP.


The project is currently hosted at SourceForge.net. You can find it here.

You can download the latest source release here. There are currently packages for Debian Woody, but as of now, it still works fine on Sid also. For binary releases (Debian packages) I suggest you contact us on the mailing-list(archives and more available here), you don't even have to subscribe to do it. There is even a French-speaking mailing-list dedicated to current users of Plume installations here.