Some highlights of what makes this a very special distribution:

• Latest desktop environments: Gnome 2.28 + KDE 4.3.x + Sugar 0.86 + IceWM. Session defaults to Gnome, choice of booting into KDE is available right from the boot menu or at the login screen
• Applications include tons of Educational apps, graphics, development(many IDEs, compilers, debuggers etc), office suite, and complete multimedia support.
• LTSP server. LTSP allows you to run openSUSE on the PCs in the network without even installing or modifying local disks, just PXE boot the machines you want as thin clients. 5 users are already created for testing, linux1 – linux5, password is linux. openSUSE’s KIWI-LTSP has a lot more features and ease of use not available anywhere else. KIWI-LTSP automatically sets up all the services required to run the server including, DHCP, NBD/AoE, TFTP etc. Ideal for school/university labs and even offices.
• Hybrid iso image, single image to burn to DVD or dd it to USB stick, USB session can be persistent if second partition is created. It can be easily installed on hard disk by running live-installer from the desktop or boot menu. Information on how to create persistent live USB from the iso see this post.
• Profiled DVD same performance tweaks as official openSUSE 11.2 medias
  
• …and lot more in neat little 2.9G package

See the screenshot gallery to find out what exactly to expect in this distro.

Torrent download here.

Use rsync or wget to download the image as firefox is known to do incomplete downloads.

The fastest way to download is using metalink client. Here is an example of commandline metalink client aria2:

aria2c -c http://www.opensuse-education.org/download/ISOs/openSUSE-Edu-li-f-e-11.2-1-i686.iso.metalink

Drop us a line if you would like to mirror this image.

Thank you openSUSE Education team members for creating perhaps the best educational resource available on Linux, all the openSUSE developers for the excellent work on 11.2 release, Marcus Schäfer for the great tool KIWI, Stephan Kulow for writing Clicfs and all the cool(o) scripts that is used to create this iso image and everyone who tested and provided feedback to improve this distribution.

As always we would like to hear from you, what would you like to see improved.

Li-f-e’s worth sharing, digg/tweet/blog/fb/share it

The event started with the welcome by Prof. Vupul Kalamkar, PhD of Bachelors of Computer Application Department, Faculty of Science, the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Vadodara. The first presentation was by Kartik Mistry,  Debian Developer on how to get started with contributing to Free Software world.

Next up was my talk featuring all the goodies we have packed in openSUSE Edu Li-f-e based on the latest openSUSE 11.2. A very passionate discussion on “user friendliness” of GNU/Linux distributions vs M$ Windows erupted when asked from the audience what was preventing them from using Linux, hopefully we were able to convey the ease of use by demonstrating many softwares that are present on Li-f-e and live demonstration of coding java, and C# by Nitin. How much easy can it get then getting IDEs such as MonoDevelop, Netbeans, Eclipse and compilers of all major programming languages out of the box.Some videos were also shown, among them Shayon’s(he is the the dude behind the camera in all pictures) promo and the stylish arrival of the geeko ending the presentation with this great video.

The hybrid iso technology was really a WOW! factor, many participants didn’t know something like this was possible and were thrilled with seeing it in action.

There were few laptops getting Linux installed, some running Ubuntu and some openSUSE, tons of live USB sticks were created and every participant went home with Ubuntu and the Li-f-e DVD.

We ended the event with a lucky draw, 3 Ubuntu t-shirts, 2 openSUSE Li-f-e t-shirts, and 2 USB sticks with Li-f-e installed on them were the prizes. Kartik Mistry had a random number generator script picking numbers, unfortunately it kept calling people who had already left or repeating numbers, so we went old fashioned with everyone present writing their names on a piece of paper and esteemed faculties of MSU BCA doing the honors of drawing the name of the winners.

Some of the pictures from the event.

We surely had a lot of fun…

Be there for the launch party in your town.

• When: 14th November 2009, 5 pm onwards
• Where: B.C.A. Dept., Faculty of Science, The M.S.University of Baroda, India Map
• Agenda: openSUSE 11.2 and Ubuntu Karmic launch party, check out two of the most popular Linux distributions while having a party, bring laptops, USB sticks or your computer box for installation.
• RSVP here

If you are not in Baroda that day, find a launch party near you to join or host one yourself.

Here is what you can look forward to: DVDs of two top Linux distributions, install fest, small presentations about what is new in this release, lucky draw for a couple of cool Li-f-e t-shirts, an of course meet the town’s Linux community members.

The venue courtesy Prof. Vipul Kalamkar, the MS University, BCA department, thank you sir for hosting the event.

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…