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Archive for June, 2009

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Promoting openSUSE-Edu: Li-f-e

June 14th, 2009 by

Dear IT Store In-charge

This is about introducing a new Operating System tailored for Education purpose.

We have demonstrated openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e(Linux For Education) OS at many stores/malls here in Baroda (India), the store managers were very thrilled to see this new technology. Gujarat State Education Board (GSEB) has introduced Linux and Open Source in curriculum from this year, session starts Monday 15 June 2009. Kerala and Tamil Nadu States are already using linux for few years now. Apart from schools and government offices running Linux, most IT colleges have Linux in their course too.

We would like your stores to keep at least one laptop/desktop running Li-f-e: Linux for Education OS running to give your store an extra advantage of being the place to get this OS free of cost. Linux and hardware that comes preloaded with it will be in massive demand as there are millions of students that will come in contact with Linux through their course curriculum.

The OS is free of cost, you are free to make as many copies you need, it can be run directly from a DVD without installation, it can also be installed very easily on a separate partition to get dual boot system running amicably along with Windows system. The OS is virus free and comes packed with hundreds of applications required by students as well as everyday user.

Details about the OS is here: http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Live

We believe this has tremendous potential of increasing sales of hardware from your stores and attract lot more happy customers. Our aim is to get the best technology to the students who will be coming in contact with this technology for the very first time, your store will greatly benefit by the goodwill this gesture will generate.

Kind regards

Jigish Gohil
On behalf of openSUSE-Edu Team

Posted in Education, Marketing | 1 Comment »

openSUSE Day (Chile). June 18th, 2009.

June 13th, 2009 by

We are hoping to have students, young people, professors, teachers, and professionals from many fields as well. Actually everyone is welcome to attend the event. We’ll have presentations, stands, gaming, and of course the fun install fest (openSUSE 11.1). And yes, you can have an original openSUSE 11.1 Live DVD if you are one of the first 400 people to get there 😉 (Thanks Zonker!).

Where? Meet us at Universidad Andres Bello (UNAB), Campus República, República 239/Subterráneo R3. Check the map here.

Time? 10 AM though 8 PM.

Talks:

  • Rafael de la Horra, from UNAB: Education for Professionals and the Free Software Environment.
  • Enrique Herrera, from Linux Latin America: GNU/Linux, 10 years of progress.
  • Myself, openSUSE Ambassador: SUSE Studio.
  • Patricia Albornoz, SUN Campus Ambassador: Netbeans and openSUSE.
  • Francisco del Castillo, from the Air Force: Linux and the Air Force.
  • Rodrigo Romo, from IBM/Tallard: Reducing Costs with IBM and Linux.

See you there. Join openSUSE and have a lot of fun!

OSD_afiche

Posted in Events | Comments Off on openSUSE Day (Chile). June 18th, 2009.

New/updated application

June 11th, 2009 by

Updated Application: bleachbit 0.5.1
Published in: home:saigkill and openSUSE:Factory:Contrib

Tags: ,
Posted in Build Service, Packaging | Comments Off on New/updated application

Transcoding/Ripping Cluster using KIWI-LTSP

June 11th, 2009 by

We had a bit of High Performance Cluster (HPC) setup already to do distributed build using Icecream on KIWI-LTSP, now Mathis has written a “howto” use KIWI-LTSP for clustered ripping and transcoding, another kind of HPC use of LTSP network. Ready to run LTSP server is integrated in openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e DVD making it very easy to do such setups.

“Since the transcoding process can take a long time, the work can be split into several fragments which then can be processed by other machines on a network. The best way to accomplish this is to set up a server which controls the transcoding process, from which the (diskless) clients can boot.”

So why openSUSE KIWI-LTSP for this job? This is what Mathis had to say: “well, I just needed some OS to boot from the network, luckily it was LTSP,  so I saved some time gathering parts for an OS since openSUSE also provides the dvd::rip and transcode packages and KIWI-LTSP automatically resolves the dependencies, this is an extra point for it…”

It could  serve digital  studios as well or convert your DVD collection to use on home media center PC very quickly 😉

Posted in Documentation, Education, Server, Wiki | Comments Off on Transcoding/Ripping Cluster using KIWI-LTSP

openSUSE-EDU

June 9th, 2009 by

Almost three years ago now I was given the privilege of creating a sub project of the openSUSE linux project. That project is known as “openSUSE-EDU” aka opensuse-education. The idea I had was to gather open source software that was specific to education environments and use the many talents of the openSUSE community and it’s full time staff to optimize the software for openSUSE.  My first Teammate and mentor into the world of Linux Projects was,  Lars Vodgt.  Lars is one of the original SuSE linux team and a co-founder of the “openshoolserver” a project that spun off from SuSE just before the Novell buy out , and is today a very useful and powerful tool for educators in Europe.  He is wonderful leader, teacher and guide.  He seems to handle almost every detail of the project like it is just a minor addition to his daily work, although we all know that the list of software titles and daily updates are far from trivial.

My first concern was  in the area of LTSP and the desktop applications that would be used with it, many schools in the US were already utilizing the efforts of ” K12LTSP”, a specialized version of LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project), to reduce the cost of classroom computing. I wanted a SuSE linux version of LTSP because I dreamed of having a ubiquitous login process to my Novell network and SuSE \ openSUSE were the only Linux distributions ever to carry the Novell Client for Linx.  Somehow, somewhere, someone brought “Cyberorg” aka Jigish Gohil to the project. Cyberorg has taken us from my simple directions to install ltsp 4.2 as an add on, to having completely integrated, award winning  packages that include the GSOC work “easy-ltsp” ( http://en.opensuse.org/LTSP) .  Cyberog is now a leader in LTSP innovation and openSUSE’s Kiwi operating system image creation utility, with which he has created several ground breaking Live disks for educators (http://en.opensuse.org/Education/live)

My second concern, and where I spend most of my time, lay in the administrative tools available to schools that could drastically reduce licensing overhead.  With the help of  Lars’s and others, the repository now includes several administrative and curriculum enhancing titles  such as Moodle, ClaSS, openBiblio, Koha and openSIS.  openSIS is personal to me as I have been working the idea of a free and open sourced student information system \ Academic ERP (http://en.opensuse.org/Education_ERP) since the very beginning, and I am it’s  Project Manager. With these tools it is my hope that we can build a service community that will help educators everywhere build and utilize a modern WEB 2.0 site that not only enhances school management but engages the student bodies to their full potential with communication and collaboration tools native to their technology experience.

Over the last 3 years, much has been accomplished by the many contributors to openSUSE-edu, this year seems to be highlighted by new members who are bringing us the most complete Sugar desktop outside the OLPC project (http://en.opensuse.org/Sugar). The Sugar desktop for those who don’t know is an invaluable resource to elementary school computer integration programs, it uses iconic metaphors to simplify navigation while providing a multitude of  challenging and useful programs.

I hope that you will join and contribute with us towards these goals by visiting http://en.opensuse.org/Education and subscribing to our mailing list at http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Communicating#Mailing_Lists

Posted in Documentation, Education | 1 Comment »

First Steps with QT/KDE Programming

June 9th, 2009 by

Since Saturday i’m lerarning prtogramming QT/KDE. It is very interesting. My first “Hello World”-Program has now an localisation in DE und EN, and an Online-Help. The next Step is an Chapter about Basics and Structure from the KDE-Programs.

Tags: ,
Posted in lizards.openSUSE.org, Localization, Miscellaneous | 2 Comments »

openSUSE@ARM/GSoC: weekly status

June 6th, 2009 by

openSUSE@ARM/GSoC: weekly status

The topic of this week was to speed up the build. As I mentioned last week, the
prototype in Base:build:arm is compiling in an emulated environment and thus is
quite slow.

I prepared a cross-toolchain from the sources of binutils, gcc44 and glibc from
openSUSE:Factory. Now its time to integrate this into the build process.
This will improve the performace of the compilation itself. But other areas
in the build process can also be improved, just think of the bash.

Some patches for the Build Service were also commited to svn.

In progress / todo:
* prepare / submit fixes for rpm
* more work on cross-toolchain

Posted in Build Service, Toolchain | Comments Off on openSUSE@ARM/GSoC: weekly status

Kraft 0.32 Live CD

June 5th, 2009 by

You might have heard about Kraft, a KDE application aimed to people who operate small enterprises and have to write an offer or invoice sometimes. Kraft version 0.32 was released recently, the last KDE 3 based version, the KDE4 port has finally started.

Kraft is one of the candidates for the KDE group for financial apps which is a consolidating idea and was encouraged in Alvaros article A group to bind them all recently.

Unfortunately it is still a bit tricky to set up. To make it easier to check it out Live Images were created featureing Kraft on an openSUSE distribution with all tools and  interesting demo data. That is perfect to try it out and give it to friends and colleagues and talk about.

Please check the download page of the Kraft Homepage for details.

Tags: , ,
Posted in KDE | 1 Comment »

GSoC – summary of this week’s meeting

June 5th, 2009 by

The last week I mainly worked on integrating the oauth rails plugin into the frontend. So far the current integration is more or less a quick hack but it is working (of course the final version won’t contain these quick hacks etc. 😉 ) and I was able to authenticate with oauth or basic auth.

Additionally I also played with the python module for oauth. At the moment there seems to be a small problem with the hmac-sha5 signature but I’m working on it (but this is most-likey “pebkac”). Anyway plaintext signatures are working.

Action items for this week:

  • integrate oauth into osc
  • investigate how to add something like a ttl for access tokens (so that an access token is only valid n hours/minutes/etc.)

Posted in Build Service | Comments Off on GSoC – summary of this week’s meeting

Netbeans 6.5 is going to Factory

June 4th, 2009 by

As you might know, the netbeans package was a part of openSUSE, but for some historical reason, it was a monolithic package in non-oss repository. Last weeks I have worked on import 29 new packages to Factory, which allows us to build netbeans from source and include it to regular free repository. Fortunately thanks for hard work of guys from jpackage project it was easy to adapt their spec files for SUSE and push them into the Factory.

Majority of those packages was reviewed and included into Factory during last weeks, but five (including netbeans) itself are currently in review process, so they would be available later. Following graph shows netbeans and it’s build dependencies. Green color means – package is in Factory, yellow means package is in review process.

Netbeans and build requires

In a meanwhile the netbeans for openSUSE Factory and 11.1 is available in Java:packages BuildService repository, so feel free to install and test it.

Posted in Build Service, Distribution, Packaging | 6 Comments »

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