After almost a decade of bringing you Li-f-e: Linux for Education based on openSUSE, it is now based on Ubuntu MATE LTS releases. I hope to provide the same excellent user experience that you have come to expect. Download it from here. Reason for this change is mentioned in previous post and it’s discussion(lack of interest/time/skills by anyone for maintaining live installer). You can of course easily enable Education Build Service repository to install packages on standard openSUSE or use susestudio to create your own spin with Education packages.

To new beginnings…

live-usb-gui now offers choice of scripts to use, depending in your need you can either use live-fat-stick with vfat partitioned stick or live-grub-stick script which works with any partition format supported by grub2 including vfat, must be used if you have iso bigger than 4G.

live-grub-stick can now create bootable USB from openSUSE installation media isos (standard DVD or NET), difference from --isohybrid option is that the data already on the stick is not touched, the whole iso is available on the stick so you can use the stick to copy it around apart from being able to install from it.

Two new options --suse-persistent(for openSUSE live ISOs) and --ubuntu-persistent(for Ubuntu and clones) are now available, using these options allows live sessions to be persistent over multiple boots, even when used on vfat partition. Again the way it is used does not need change in partition format of the stick, existing data on the stick remains untouched.

Feel free to fork https://github.com/cyberorg/live-fat-stick if you want some more enhancements.

Tally multiuser is served from a Samba share  on a NAS device, Tally folder is copied to samba share and path to Tally Data is changed so that it points there. Everything they need including printing and export(CSV) works from all clients. Same way Tally can be run on standalone computers. Neither Tally, Wine or openSUSE are modified for getting it working as it would under Windows environment.

The openSUSE project has stopped producing live medias for Leap and also live-installer is dropped from live medias created for the Tumbleweed distribution. As Li-f-e is primarily a live distribution we would not be able to create any more medias without live-installer. So unless this situation changes we may not have Li-f-e based on Leap 42.2.

In the meantime I’ve had a look at Ubuntu to create Li-f-e based on the latest LTS release of Ubuntu-Mate, check it out here. Software selection available is kept identical to the Li-f-e based on openSUSE, however there is always a room for improvement, suggestions to enhance it are always welcome.

If you wish to get involved with the project maintaining packages, fixing/reporting bugs, follow the links on the X11:Sugar build service project page.

How to use it?
Pass “toram” parameter at the boot menu. Try it on Li-f-e.

Benefits:
Running the OS from RAM make it lot more responsive than running from DVD or USB device, for example it is most useful for running a demo computer where many users try lot of applications installed in the live system. USB or the DVD can be ejected once the OS is loaded. It can be used to load OS to RAM directly from iso in a virtual machine as well.

Caveat:
Needs enough RAM to copy the entire iso to RAM and then some spare to operate the OS, Li-f-e for instance would need minimum 5G RAM available. It also takes a bit longer to boot as the entire image is copied to RAM.

Grub2 has come a long way and almost all major distributions now support booting from the iso image via loopback. So here is live-grub-stick script that uses grub in place of syslinux bringing in all the advantages of using grub2.

Currently live images of openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora and all their clones are supported. Go ahead and fork it if you would like to add support for your distribution.

As with previous releases we have bundled a ton of softwares on this live DVD/USB specially packaged for education, along with the Plasma, GNOME and Mate Desktop Environments, full multimedia experience is also provided out of the box thanks to the Packman repositories. Only x86_64 architecture is supported, if you have a lot of machines that only support x86 then read on to find out how you can extend their Li-f-e.

You can of course very easily turn Li-f-e to full-fledged LTSP server to PXE boot machines in your local network. Booting both i686 and x86_64 architectures is supported. In case you need to PXE boot machines below i686 then you would have to install this package.

Happy holidays!

Get Li-f-e from here: Direct Download | md5sum | Alternate download and mirrors

Here is how you can get openSUSE running on Banana Pi M2.

* Download the image

* Extract the archive to get openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Bpi-M2-Xfce.img

* Dump openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Bpi-M2-Xfce.img on to a SD card
(dd if=/path/to/openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Bpi-M2-Xfce.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M; sync #replace /dev/sdX with your actual SD card device)

*  In case you have a bigger SD card, use yast2 disk(partitioner) to “expand” the second partition. You can use yast’s package manager to install more software. The default password for root is linux, you may want to change that first thing after booting.

I am unable to get sound on this hardware, probably their kernel is missing sound related modules, if you figure out how to get sound working drop me a line so I can include it in next release.Everything else(wifi, hdmi out, USB ports etc) works well enough.