openSUSE Education community is proud to announce openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e: Linux for Education based on openSUSE 11.2 . Li-f-e flavor bundles the best of softwares openSUSE has to offer, such as most popular Desktop Environments, educational application, development suites, multimedia, great user experience out of the box, and a lot more that is expected in a modern Operating System.
Some highlights of what makes this a very special distribution:
If you are running the openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 6 (Gnome 2.27.5, Kernel 2.6.31-rc6-3-default) and find out that clicks of touchpad do not work, then this might help you a bit.
First of all, go to the Control Center, and look up for the Mouse item. Then click on Touchpad (obviously not using your computer’s touchpad, heh) and mark the option Enable mouse clicks with touchpad. That’d work fine 🙂
I must thank my friend Pedro Villavicencio of Ubuntu for letting me know about this solution.
Just incase you’ve been living under a rock on Mars there is a certain feature request in openFate. Both Michael and Zonker have posted on the matter but as they are both Internal (as in they get paid by the Big N) I thought I’d throw my external views (these views are not solicited by anyone other than me, yadayadayada) into the pot. Now I know I was asked to put my thoughts down and send them into the mailing list, but to be honest the whole discussion has turned into a childish “My dad’s got bigger knuckles than your dad” style flamewar and there are multiple threads on the one topic. Personally I have now switched off of the discussion on the lists as it’s hard to follow and frankly going nowhere.
Firstly I’d like to think that Frank had no malice in filing the feature and only had the best intentions for KDE and openSUSE at heart. The problem is there doesn’t seem to have been enough background checks and verification of facts prior to unleashing this handgrenade of annoying pointlessness. If you default on a loan/mortgage/credit card you are in jeopardy of loosing assets. The same can be carried over to this discussion.
There are pretty many pros and cons and even more people with their opinion about the feature. I’d like to summarize what has been said in the discussion in the feature itself and during yesterday’s openSUSE project meeting. Unfortunately the only sure thing is whatever decision is taken – it will be wrong for some. This is why, at this time, we have no default – because openSUSE has strong GNOME and KDE implementations, we offer them side-by-side as equals. And we made 2 years ago on opensuse-project the decision that we stay with “no default” desktop.
So what do we have so far?
What has openSUSE-Edu project been up to these days?
More Live Images:
openSUSE-Edu team has been working hard to polish the various image “flavours”. The latest addition to the images is openSUSE-Edu-Desktop. This image contains the latest GNOME with many useful educational applications.
Samyak Bhuta, our designer came up with a new theme for this image, called “Classroom”. Click on the image below to see whole album and theme brief:
Sugared up openSUSE
David “Nubae” Van Assche, has been busy as a bee 😉 bringing most comprehensive Sugar suite to openSUSE, you can find Sugar, Fructose, Sucrose, Honey and all other sweet tooth satisfying goodies in our repository. Try “Tam Tam Jam”, even grown ups will be whiling away hours having fun. Sugar can be installed on standard openSUSE 11.1 giving another session at login just as KDE/GNOME. Live CD is also under development, if you want to check out things to come get openSUSE-Sugar-live-unstable iso from here(mind the -unstable).
Here are the activities to look forward to enjoy with your children:
Thanks Nubae, Alsroot and all the Sugar developers for the great work.
KIWI-LTSP
We have KIWI-LTSP, easiest to run Linux Terminal Server based onthe latest LTSP5 and openSUSE’s KIWI imaging technology on openSUSE-Edu-Live-Li-f-e DVD. Just click on the icon on the desktop to get fully working LTSP server with tons of Education application, things can’t get simpler than that to set up a classroom running openSUSE in minutes 🙂
Future plans for openSUSE 11.2:
openSUSE-Edu Testing Team
We are forming a testing team to keep very high standards for all the applications shipped on openSUSE-Edu medias. Here is what you need to join the party:
If you are interested add yourself to the list here:
http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Team
Events
The project will be represented at LinuxTag 2009, spotting the booth should be easy, there will be “Geeko” and people wearing cool openSUSE-Edu t-shirts 😉
Ciao
Let’s make openSUSE-Edu the best Li-f-e experience.
Well, today I downloaded the Gnome Live CD first, and had no luck at all. That was no fun watching the busy cursor over and over again after selecting the Live CD option from the Menu so I decided to get the DVD just to see if things went different (actually not the only reason for), and sure they were. First, I installed the KDE Desktop, not a deal through the install process. Then came the first log in and all well. Of course I chose the Ext4 file system and I can tell it feels faster than our good old Ext3 ;).
Then it was time for Gnome. As usual, default install took longer than KDE’s. One thing I removed from the software was Desktop Effects, since I started to believe that that could cause the problem with the Live CD Media. So on through the install process, it went down really well. Then at first log in I got alerted over GDM and Metacity. I got this:
By default, the Slab Menu Icon looks like this when Main Panel’s Size is 24 pixels:
Looks like your computer is not your computer, right? Well, I just resized Main Panel up to 26 pixels so it looks like better:
I must admit that I like the default theme. Absolutely new, darkish, professional. First time I feel comfortable “out of the box”. One feature that is not workig 100% is the System Monitor. At this time I cannot switch between tabs. The rest of the system is pretty running smoothly to me. Here you have a screenshot of my desktop:
As posted to the openSUSE-GNOME Mailing List.
Thanks to all who showed up to help on the bug day on
Friday, your efforts are greatly appreciated.
We started with just over 70 bugs and left the *obby
session available over the weekend. By the end of the
weekend, we had reviewed 14 bugs (9 of which we closed).
These were all Critical and Major bugs listed for openSUSE
11.1.
I will be closing the *obby session this afternoon at about
1700 CDT.
Thanks again!
—
Christopher M. Hobbs [chobbs@siloamsprings.com]
Network Administrator, City of Siloam Springs
Because I feel a tad bit guilty about missing all of the Community Week sessions this week (school and work training, and before you ask, I’ve got more training all this weekend, so I can’t make those sessions either), I did decide to do a quick tour of the GNOME Shell, one of the integral parts of the GNOME 3 series, scheduled to be coming out in 2010 or so.
First, big thanks to Vincent Untz for packaging the GNOME Shell packages for openSUSE! I’m using these packages for my testing purposes
Here’s the quick tour:
First, here’s the openSUSE 11.1 desktop w/ GNOME 2.24 running GNOME Shell:
GNOME Shell Desktop
Note the Activity menu and the specially-capulated notification area. Good stuff. I al so like the stylized panel, but I don’t like it at the top. When openSUSE adopts GNOME 3, I’d like to see it moved to the bottom.
Windows being created from the Application Launcher
Clicking on the Activity menu opens this menu. The desktop shrinks into a side (and you can create or remove as many as you wish, which is seriously awesome), and opens the most recent Applications and documents (I think). If you wish to open an application, double-click or drag the icon onto the desktop you wish it to open to.
Search
Here I did a simple search for SUSE. Applications and documents that matched that search pop up (although I’m not sure what indexing service that is, I’m relatively sure it’s not Beagle, openSUSE’s desktop search indexer).
Full search results shown
Here’s an expanded view of the search for apps with SUSE. The desktops slide out of the way, and a multi-column (and page) view pops up. To open, drag an icon over to the right (onto the desktop).
Overall, I like it. Combined with the new stuff coming next year in GNOME 3, this could be quite an interesting release. One of the most important things to note is that this interface seems incredibly tailored toward netbook’s small screens.
What do you think?
PSA sent to opensuse-gnome@opensuse.org, opensuse-project@opensuse.org, opensuse-announce@opensuse.org
Please join us for the openSUSE-GNOME BugDay code named “Community Effort” tomorrow
(Friday 14 MAY 2009) at 1100EDT/1500UTC.
We’ll be squashing blocker, critical, and major bugs in 11.1 related to GNOME.
More information can be found on the wiki:
http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/BugDays/20090514
A Gobby session will be announced at the beginning of the meeting to assign/close
bugs. Should you have any questions, feel free to ask in #openSUSE-GNOME on Freenode,
or email me directly.
We hope to see you there!
—
Christopher M. Hobbs [chobbs@siloamsprings.com]
Network Administrator, City of Siloam Springs
Roll up those sleeves and mark your calendars, because here comes another BugDay!
During Community Week (http://en.opensuse.org/CommunityWeek), I’ll be hosting another openSUSE-GNOME BugDay on Fri, 15 MAY 2009. We’ll start promptly at 1000 CDT and will continue until 1600 CDT. I will be around very early in the day to start prep for the meeting should you have any questions.
We’ll conduct business in #opensuse-gnome on Freenode (irc.freenode.net). I will establish a Gobby session as I’ve done in the past, and we’ll work off of that.
Can’t wait to see you there!
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