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Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

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Cutting-edge LTSP

June 17th, 2009 by

openSUSE 11.2 development started a while back, now that we have passed Milestone2, development work on KIWI-LTSP using openSUSE 11.2 base has started, with that we get a host of new features.

The highlights of new packages:
– Uses clicfs for NBD/AOE root image. clicfs: Compressed Loop Image Container is a file system created by Stephan Kulow. So we do not need squashfs and aufs anymore for LTSP images. Clicfs gives better compression, image size is about 10% smaller than same image created using squashfs.
– Kernel 2.6.30
– New look by Samyak Bhuta
– New xorg, CONFIGURE_X in lts.conf no longer necessary

The packages are available in server:ltsp repository.

Follow these instructions to test the development packages on already configured LTSP server:

#Take backup so system can be restored as it is if something do go wrong
mv /srv/kiwi-ltsp/i386.img /srv/kiwi-ltsp/i386-squashfs.img
mv /srv/tftpboot/boot /srv/tftpboot/boot-old
#remove current images
rpm -e kiwi-ltsp-prebuilt kiwi-ltsp-bootimages --nodeps
#add repository and install development packages
zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/server:/ltsp/openSUSE_11.1 server:ltsp
zypper in kiwi-ltsp-bootimages-unstable kiwi-ltsp-prebuilt-unstable

Bugs, feature requests go here. See http://en.opensuse.org/LTSP#Communicate for more ways to give feedback.

Happy testing…

Posted in Education, Server | Comments Off on Cutting-edge LTSP

OBS-Education Questions specific to openSUSE Education development, bugs, enhancements, etc.

June 15th, 2009 by

Please take a look at the new forum for the opensuse-edu project.

http://forums.opensuse.org/obs-projects/obs-education/

Hopefully the start of a lot more communication and growth!

Posted in Education, Events, lizards.openSUSE.org | Comments Off on OBS-Education Questions specific to openSUSE Education development, bugs, enhancements, etc.

South East Linux Fest

June 15th, 2009 by

This week I attended SELF (South East Linux Fest) at Clemson University here in South Carolina. It was a great day! I met and worked the openSUSE booth with Joe Brockmeier aka “Zonker”.  There were lots of enthusiastic attendees both from the Linux and Education communities.  All of the Educators that came to visit the booth where extremely pleased with the work the EDU team has completed and If I had been able to supply them, many would have taken copies of the EDU Li-F-E disk and Sugar disk that I had running on my laptop.  Cyberog and the team really have hit a home run! I had with me a thin client setup and did several demonstrations  on the ease of installation and setup.  Kiwi-LTSP is one of the most exciting products for Education I have seen in a long time.  Easy-LTSP, the openSUSE configuration utility for LTSP, is by far the easiest configuration utility available to LTSP users. Combine Easy-LTSP and Italc (a computerlab monitoring suite) and in 5 minutes a teacher can setup a computer lab and either display the lesson on each\all screen or capture a students screen for display to others or simple monitoring of all screens.

I sat through a couple of presenters and I was most excited to hear Chad Wollenburg from VA. Chad is a kindred spirit , he has been slowly moving his district to open source for a few years now and he started much the same way most of us have, his school district could not afford to relicense Microsoft office.  He too, had to show that Open Office was compatible and comparable to MSOffice and explain the over 200,000.o0$ savings to his district using small steps and insider advocates as his method of operation. I am glad to meet so many people dedicated to reducing the “criminal” costs of licensing.

Our project itself past another milestone this week, I am proud to present the OBS-Education forum. http://forums.opensuse.org/obs-projects/obs-education/      Please feel free to post questions specific to openSUSE Education development, bugs, enhancements, etc.

Posted in Documentation, Education, Events, lizards.openSUSE.org | Comments Off on South East Linux Fest

Indian Government takes a lead in getting FOSS in Education

June 15th, 2009 by

Open Source is getting bigger by the day in India. Success stories such as Tamil Nadu going completely open source, NRCFOSS and CDAC launching Debian based BOSS Linux distribution tailored for India in many Indian languages and the recent steps by Gujarat State Education Board(GSEB) to give 50% weightage to Open Source and Linux in Computer subject across all streams (Science, Commerce and Arts).

There is lot more happening to get the best of FOSS to students. Project FOSSEducation initiative by Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay(IIT-B) is an Ministry of Human Resource Development(MHRD) funded project as part of the National Mission on Education through ICT with the thrust area being Adaptation and deployment of open source simulation packages equivalent to MATLAB, ORCAD etc.

*The goal of the project is to replace the use of commercial tools in Indian science and engineering education at the college level*

The project is hiring developers, paying them top salaries to work on FOSS softwares such as Scilab, NumPy, SciPy, etc. I wish Professor Prabhu Ramachandran and his team all the success in their endeavor and wish for lot more such news from all over the world 🙂

Posted in Education | 5 Comments »

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 »

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 »

Call for Contribution: LinuxTag @ RadioTux

June 3rd, 2009 by

RadioTux – the german Linuxradio – are present in LinuxTag Berlin. The following Community-Guys would be interviewed:

* Joe Zonker Brockmeier – openSUSE Community, SUSE Community Week, SUSE Summit
* Cornelius Schuhmacher – SUSE Studio
* Brent McDonnell – iFolder
* Jan Weber-SUSE Education.

If you have any Questions, you can submit the Questions to: live@radiotux.de. Then we’re using your Questions Live at LinuxTag.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Distribution, Education, Events, lizards.openSUSE.org, Marketing | Comments Off on Call for Contribution: LinuxTag @ RadioTux

Coming soon on the servers near you: Easy-LTSP-NG

June 2nd, 2009 by

Easy-LTSP, an easy to use GUI to configure LTSP‘s lts.conf file was developed as a part of Google Summer of Code ’08 by Jan Weber. It was written in C#, it was decided to use C# at that time to accomplish a complex task in a very short period of time given for GSOC. Thanks to it setting up LTSP on openSUSE is just a few mouse clicks.

Easy-LTSP was designed to work on any distribution, but unfortunately it is not integrated anywhere other than openSUSE, discussing with the upstream LTSP developers suggested the slight reservation could be due to it being written in C#. We wanted to add new features to the GUI to take care of all the exciting new development we have in KIWI-LTSP so it was felt that the rewrite will be much better option than to extend the current code, as it is anyway being written from scratch why not use something like Python which would be easier to attract more contributors and increase possibility that users of all distributions running LTSP server can benefit from it inclusion in their prefered distro.

Here are the screencaps of the “Next Generation” Easy-LTSP(click image to see full album):

The code is in very initial stage, many things do not work yet, these screenies would give some idea where the design is going. If you are a developer interested in hacking get the source from here, drop us a line if you want SVN commit access. If you are a user and have some suggestions or an idea how this tool should be like file an enhancement request on devzilla here.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Education, Server, Usability | 1 Comment »

openSUSE-Edu: looks pretty too

May 30th, 2009 by

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:

  • Integrate stgraber’s ltsp-cluster work, simple load balancing cluster is already supported, but is limited to small cluster of upto 5 servers
  • Jan weber is currently rewriting Easy-LTSP GUI for LTSP management in python, the idea is that now more distributions may feel comfortable including it getting all the benefits we have been enjoying for some time now. Watch out for the Easy-LTSP-ng, get the source if you would like to work on it.  Feedback, suggestions always welcome
  • Use new clicfs images for the NBD and AOE root

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:

  • Fast net connection to download and test new images
  • Good bug reporting(fixing would be big advantage) skills
  • Lurk on IRC Freenode #opensuse-edu to squash bugs that can be fixed quickly

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.

Posted in Artwork, Education, GNOME | 1 Comment »

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