Li-f-e at iFest @ DA-IICT

openSUSE Education team from Baroda: Samyak Bhuta, Biswajyoti Mahanta and me, were all wearing either Li-f-e or openSUSE t-shirts, many students got the latest edition of Li-f-e based on openSUSE 11.2 installed on their USB sticks. DA-IICT will also be hosting iso image and presentations on their internal network for everyone on campus to download.

The sessions were interactive demonstrations of Li-f-e, http://susestudio.com, and Blender(by Biswa) the presentations openSUSE-Edu-Li-f-e.pdf and Blender.pdf used are available here.

Designed and modeled by Samyak Bhuta

We will be proudly wearing this when presenting Li-f-e at ifest celebrating 125 years of innovation, imagination, implementation and engineering with IEEE at the DA-IICT, Gandhinagar, India on 2 November 2009.

If you are in India and would like your favorite distribution shipped at very low cost head here.

#To find your usb stick device run the following in terminal as root
fdisk -l
If you have just one hard disk, the usb stick is usually /dev/sdb

Unmounting all partitions automatically mounted when inserting the usb stick.
umount /dev/sdb1
(umount /dev/sdbX for each partition if you have more partitions on the stick)

Finally dump the image to the stick:
dd if=/full/path/to/openSUSE-Edu-live-li-f-e-unstable.i686-0.6.0-Build28.1.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M
Follow the first link in the post if you have free space on the stick that can be used to write data to.

This image is made possible thanks to tons of hard work by Coolo, Schaefi and following KDE hybrids created by Beineri, and of course Tom “satellit” Gilliard for test driving it before the announcement

Have a lot of fun testing…

Quoting from the circular sent out:

Friends, it is the time to click on current opportunities with Linux. As you would be knowing that the Higher Secondary School of Gujarat(India) Board Syllabus are now covering Linux, Open Source Technology, Open Office etc….Again, Government also believes and is promoting open source platform. It is high time to capture such business, and so this TECHNOLOGY should be well understood by the BITA Members.

Potential customer-base comprising of more than 5000 Schools, thousands of students, lots of home PCs – today and in near future, there will definitely be a lot of increase in the need of dual-platform in Computer systems. Are we ready for that?

We will be having hands-on sessions on openSUSE-Edu: Li-f-e (Linux for Education) distribution, participants will get to take home a copy too.

More information and participation form (if you are a BITA member) here.

The changes from the last release:

Lif-e:

- All openSUSE updates including the latest stable kernel 2.6.27.25
- Nvu is replaced by Kompozer
- New KIWI-LTSP images

KIWI-LTSP

- rebuild using the latest 11.1 updates
- kernel 2.6.27-25
- now includes kernel-default-extra (snd-cs4231)
- includes qtnx – nx client
select localIceWM session and launch it from there

Get the DVD from here: http://tr.im/Get_Life

To update KIWI-LTSP images on live servers, run the following as root:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/server:/ltsp/openSUSE_11.1/ server:ltsp
zypper ref
zypper up -t package -r server:ltsp

(Note: Download is about 180M, time to complete will depend on your internet connection speed)

Make sure the package versions are same as these:

kiwi-ltsp-bootimages-0.7.8-2.2
kiwi-ltsp-prebuilt-0.7.8-2.1

Here is a review of Li-f-e by Lisa Hoover.

Have a lot of fun…

Boot from Li-f-e DVD and launch Stellarium application.

Select location as shown in the screenshot – Gujarat, India. The location selection dialog comes from the menu on the left hand side of the screen, hit the mouse in that corner to bring the menu up.

Set Date and Time, 22 July 2009, 5:30 am

Search for the Sun, hit “Space” to center it

Turn off atmosphere for better clarity

Zoom in with mouse scroll so the sun fills the screen, fast forward a bit to speed up the eclipse

It’s not the same as the real deal, but awesome anyway, thanks Samyak for the idea. Enjoy

* Gnome 2.26.3
* Firefox 3.5
* Latest Sugar, Browse activity now using Mozilla xpcom and xulrunner version 1.9.1
* All openSUSE 11.1 updates since last build

Happy learning…

openSUSE Education team have also been working on getting Sugared up openSUSE in various (yet to be named) flavors . Thomas C Gilliard (satellit) has put up openSUSE-Sugar VMWare appliance, get it from here. Apart from VMWare appliance openSUSE-Sugar is also available in live CD and USB/flash stick version.

Here are the instructions for running VMWare appliance. To deploy USB stick image, download the image – openSUSE-Sugar-liveUSB-unstable.i686-0.X.X-BuildX.XX.raw.bz2. and run this command to deploy on the stick plugged in /dev/sdX.

bzcat imagename.raw.bz2 | dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4k

Run dmesg to find out where the USB is plugged in, replace /dev/sdX with the actual device, for example: /dev/sdb and umount it before running this command.

We also have openSUSE Li-f-e : Linux for Education DVD that has Sugar launcher right on the gnome desktop, it contains same number of activities as Sugar only flavors.

David Van Assche(nubae) and the Moodle team are putting together great numbers of useful courses on newly launched education portal http://linux-for-education.org. Here teachers and students can find courses that helps learning their preferred subject with the aid of Li-f-e and other educational distributions. Check out the courses on Sugar and Perfect openSUSE Education Desktop.

Happy learning…

Make sure you do not miss Easy-LTSP presentation by Jan Weber tomorrow, I have vested interest in that one