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…

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.

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

Many thanks to openSUSE/SUSE who willing to become one of the sponsor for this event. I organized some friends from Indonesia openSUSE community to make an openSUSE booth. We prepare several PC and RasPi for some demo and displaying openSUSE 13.2. I really appreciate the help from Andi Sugandi, Yan Arief Purwanto, and Adnan Kurniawan for their time in this event. Joey Li from SUSE Taiwan, Max Huang from Taiwan openSUSE community and Bin Li from China openSUSE community, also came and joint us on the event.

During 2 days (May 8-9) of the event our booth always full of visitor. They asked many questions regarding openSUSE and we tried to answer it directly as we can. We distributed around 200 DVD (openSUSE 13.2 x86_64) and stickers. We also make a short quiz/questionnaire and the top 30 people with highest answer will get a nice looking t-shirt on the 2^nd day

On the 2^nd day me and Joey Li were also give talk. My presentation is “Linux for Basic Education, Is it Feasible?”, while Joey Li is talking about “Signature Verification of Hibernate Snapshot”

Thanks to wonderful people of openSUSE and GNOME, and finally some happy face with openSUSE t-shirt!

More photos can be seen on GNOME.Asia 2015 Flickr Group

History

LibAO is developed under Xiph umbrella. Xiph is the organization who brought you Ogg/Vorbis, FLAC, Theora and currently they are hammering together next generation video codec Daala. Opus-audio codec standard is also Xiph project. LibAO rised from Xiph’s need multi-platform audio output library for Vorbis-audio codec. In this point if you don’t have any glue what I just said in last sentences I think you should take your spoon and start shovelling about Open Source audio codecs.
Becaus of the history libAO only has output mode and doesn’t use any callbacks. It doesn’t have fancy Float32 mode (as much as I understood) but that doesn’t say it’s bad thing. It works as expected you just feed bytes and after while you hear them from your speakers.

What about API

Supported outputs: Alsa, Oss, Jack, Mac OS X, Windows
License: GNU General Public license 2.0+

As said libAO API is difficult to describe since there almost ain’t NAN of it. You initialize, ask output device, put in your mode settings and start feeding data. Pulseaudio simple is almost easy as this but it’s still more difficult if you compare it to libAO. LibAO doesn’t support recording so only output and there must be a way to use another device than default but it’s not very easy to find or I was too lazy to dig it out.

So who wants to use libAO? People in hurry and don’t mind GPL-license, someone with very very tiny need of just getting audio out and people how hate bloat.

Summary: So if you hate bloat and again license doesn’t make you unhappy please use this library. Still libAO has kind of same problem that ALSA has. It’s mature, usable and ready for hardcore torturing but is it sexy? No! Is fresh? No, No! Is something that will change it API every week or hour?

After this I have to choose what to bring next. I have FFmpeg, Gstreamer and VLC in row. If you have opinion about next framework let me know.

There is BerryTerminal project which makes it possible to use Raspberry Pi as LTSP Thin Client, on the server you can run any distribution that can run LTSP server, it can be running CPU with x86/x86_64/whatever architecture as LTSP provides a way to run X session from the server via SSH tunnel. Biggest benefit of running LTSP is centralized user and data management, and clients can be of modest specification as all clients’ sessions are run on the server. This is a drawback as well, as the server needs to be powerful enough to handle many sessions. This is where LTSP Fat Client help, it allows running of users’ session on the client that are powerful enough, while users and data are stored on the central server allowing modest server to serve many more clients than it would otherwise. Raspberry Pi is not that capable to run full featured Linux desktop, Banana Pi with it’s dual core CPU and 1 GB RAM is just good enough to work as a Thin Client as well as a Fat Client. perfect for home, small office or school lab.

Piece of history, first ever Banana Pi LTSP terminal running openSUSE KIWI-LTSP

There is openSUSE 13.1 available for Banana Pi, it comes with XFCE desktop and many useful software pre-installed. Because I do not know how to create images for this hardware, that image is used as a base for Banana Terminal. Here are the steps to turn your Banana Pi into LTSP client.

* Download openSUSE-Bananapi-LTSP.tar.xz

* Extract the archive to get openSUSE-Bananapi-LTSP.img from it.

* Dump the openSUSE-Bananapi-LTSP.img on to a SD card, see step 5 here.

* Change settings according to your network configuration

In the second partition of SD card etc/lts.conf edit the SERVER variable to point to LTSP server in your network.

* Plug the SD card in your Banana Pi and boot it up, make sure the network is connected and LTSP server is set up properly. You have to create users on the server to use for login on client.

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

If you would like to run LTSP client on ARM7 hardware supported by openSUSE I would be happy to accept hardware donation to get it working

Have a lot of fun…