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 package is a beta version and might include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs. Especially, please test the three new extensions: NLPSolver, oooblogger, and Google Docs and Zoho.

Most annoying bugs

• the new GDOCS extension adds icons that look ugly in the big size
• Go-oo-specific strings are not translated
• See bugzilla for more
  

Other information and plans:

The next beta3 build should be available two weeks from now. The current plans are to provide the final build in the middle of December. Though, the release will most likely slip to January.

openSuSE-11.2 Update repo

openSuSE-11.2 Standard repo

regards,
have fun

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…

We had a couple of demo systems, DVDs and LiveCDs to distribute and discussed openSUSE.

I gave a short presentation about the new features of openSUSE 11.2, then Klaas interpreted Will (his voice was trailing off) who was showcasing some less known KDE 4 features.

The discussions continued while eating pizza.

Henne gave a demo of Freevo.

Further Launch Events

There are a couple more launch events world wide the next days and weeks, check – and update the complete list.

As usual it comes with tons of new up to date software and also the installation runs smoothly, please read the announcement for all the details, but what for me the most remarkable with 11.2 is that it is a real community openSUSE distro.

There is so much effort visible in 11.2 which was achieved through our growing community rather than just the SUSE people. We had a lots of requests in openFATE suggesting features, we discussed some of them quite heated, others were no-brainer. We again had lots of testers who hammered the alphas and betas and reported big and small bugs. On the openSUSE Conference many discussions about the upcoming distribution took place which were inspiring. We were able to utilize the powerful openSUSE Buildservice to build the distro together with all packagers very effectively. That improved the quality of our packages again. Another very visible thing for me personally is the desktop artwork which was done in best cooperation with upstream – and it looks so great that I hesitate to start applications which cover the desktop all day

It is really exciting to see how things come together on the way to community distribution, and how far we got with openSUSE 11.2. I am happy about that and I am proud to be part of this and like to say thank you for every little bit you might have contributed. I believe that the message that openSUSE is your community distribution has arrived.

Of course openSUSE continues to be open for your ideas, the distribution can be the vehicle to power up ideas from a little application to huge software projects. The openSUSE project is the powerful community behind which helps to make ideas reality. And all that based on the principles of free software! I am really happy today and very excited about what future will bring

I hope to see you on the release event here in Nürnberg soon

The setup is a breeze:

1. Download the 11.2 hybrid live media

2. Byte-copy the hybrid iso to your USB stick /dev/sdX
dd if=openSUSE-11.2-KDE4-LiveCD-i686.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=32kBe aware that dd will erase all vital data from your flash media! Thus double-check that /dev/sdX actually is your USB stick.

3. Utilize fdisk to prepare an empty 0×83 partition for persistence from the remaining space on /dev/sdX, i.e. /dev/sdX2 (you should have at least a 2GB USB stick to be able to do this). The 0×83 partition /dev/sdX2 doesn’t need to be formatted with any filesystem – Kiwi will take care of this on first boot fully automatically.

That’s it! More detailed information about persistent 11.2 LiveUSB setup can be found on the wiki

Have a lot of fun!

Additional Hint: If you happen to have an installed version of openSUSE 11.2 already and prefer a GUI method to deploy the hybrid iso to USB flash media, you also may use kiwi-tools-imagewriter instead of dd.

Be there for the launch party in your town.

The package is the first beta version and might include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs. Especially, please test the three new extensions:

• NLPSolver
• oooblogger
• Google Docs and Zoho

Most annoying bugs

• xls, xlsx import does not work (bnc#504623)
• find & replace dialog broken (bnc#552450)
• the new GDOCS extension adds icons that look ugly in the big size
• Go-oo-specific strings are not translated
• SLED10 build is not ready
• OpenOffice_org-voikko is not rebuilt for openSUSE-11.0
• …
  

Other information and plans:

This build was delayed more than usual because we worked on OOo-3.1.1 packages for openSUSE-11.2. The next beta2 build should be available one week from now. The current plans are to provide the final build in the middle of December. Though, the release will most likely slip to January.

Next step is to implement the attribute system (http://lizards.opensuse.org/2009/11/02/obs-attribute-system/)