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

Get Li-f-e from here : Direct Download | Torrents | Metalinks | md5sum

openSUSE Education community is proud to bring you an early Christmas and New Year’s present: openSUSE Education Li-f-e. It is based on the recently released openSUSE 13.1 with all the official online updates applied.

We have put together a nice set of tools for everyone including teachers, students, parents and IT administrators.  It covers quite a lot of territory: from chemistry, mathematics to astronomy and Geography. Whether you are into software development or just someone looking for Linux distribution that comes with everything working out of the box, your search ends here.

Edit: We now also have x86_64 version supporting UEFI boot available for download.

Screenshots.

Let’s briefly go through some of the thing you may find in this release:

Education

Master chemistry with Avogadro and Kalzium periodic table. Avogadro is intended not only for molecular modeling research, but also for educational use. Check out their website to find out how you can use it for education. Learn with flash cards, polish your word skills with Kanagram, Stardict dictionary or employ a typing tutor.

Want to create or become a Math genius? Get ahead with algebra, geometry or statistics.

For little ones, explore games and interactive pictographs to learn using Gcompris and Little Wizard.

If theology is your thing, there is Bibletime which can help you study the Bible, the Koran and other texts including fiction and non-fiction can be read on one of the many ebook readers included such as FBReader, Evince, Okular etc.

Boldly go where you have never gone before with Stellarium and explore our globe using Marble.

Multimedia & Gaming

Direct and edit your own short film or edit music using Openshot & Audacity, watch movies and listen to music in any format using your favorite software including VLC, MPlayer Rhythmbox, Audacious and many more.

Create anything you fancy in 3D, including animation using Blender, or bring out a master artist in you, edit photographs using Gimp, create stunning panoramas using Hugin, create vector art with Inkscape or SK1.

You can of course have some fun playing games, classic solitaire and mines are bundled along with many others to exercise your brain. Latest Steam can be installed easily as well.

Office

Get organized with VYM mind mapping, GNUCash finance, complete LibreOffice suite, or manage timetable for your educational institution.

More cool stuff

There is Wine and Dosbox to help you run softwares you just cannot live without from the other operating systems.

This is also the easiest way to get LTSP(Linux Terminal Server) running on openSUSE. For developers, full LAMP stack, C, C++, Ruby development and even C# and .NET development using Monodevelop is included.

Under the hood

Linux 3.11.6

KDE 4.11.1

GNOME 3.10.2

Here is the complete list of packages installed on this media.

Check out the openSUSE 13.1 release announcement and sneak peeks for in-depth features of this release.

Download and discover all of this and lot more.

Fine print:

Requires minimum 15GB partition, 30GB is recommended if you intend to use it as your main operating system and 1 GB of RAM. Running it from DVD will be very slow so create live USB stick for testing and installation.

Test reports, blog posts, reviews are always welcome – if you encounter any problems, feel free to contact us via any way mentioned in our wiki or write a bug report.

Have a lot of fun…

Your openSUSE Education Team

Fortunately at the end of August 2013 I discovered pipelight, a very smart idea to use MS Silverlight based website natively on Linux. The problem was however to find a working pipelight package for openSUSE. As there was none, I decided to build one myself using the incredible openSUSE Build Service. It was quite a quest to obtain a working package, but due to very good cooperation with the pipelight developers, I’m now able to present a working pipelight package to the openSUSE community. Oh, and while working on the package I reported a bug via the bug report system, that was solved and published via an rpm package within 1 hour after reporting it (that was during out of office hours). Indeed within 1 hour after reporting the problem it was; accepted, investigated, analysed, fixed, tested, handed over to me, packaged, tested and published! The amazing world of Open Source Software!

Pipelight works okay for the following sites (among many others): arte, LOVEFiLM, Netflix, Magister based NL schoolwebsites, WATCHEVER, etc. View the complete list on the pipelight website.

The installation instructions are on the pipelight website. Be aware though, that pipelight requires the wine package that is provided via the home:rbos:pipelight repository. With any other wine package, pipelight will (very likely) not work. If you rely on your currently installed wine package and installed MS applications and are unsure that the wine package provided via the home:rbos:pipelight repository will leave your currently in use MS applications untouched: don’t install pipelight (or only after making very good backups). You can always start by installing pipelight in a virtual machine.

Have fun with pipelight.

Today I’ve pushed to openSUSE:Factory Banshee 2.0.1 (latest stable release) and a few packages which live in the Banshee repository. I’ve also submitted a deletion request to ipod-sharp which is no longer maintained and was replaced in the past for libgpod.

I’ve fixed the pending issues I’ve seen on the Banshee repository and Banshee 2.0.1 and disabled SLE 11 builds (not requiring all the dependencies). The repository serves now the following platforms (banshee and banshee-community-extensions):
* SLE 11 SP1;
* openSUSE 11.3;
* openSUSE 11.4;
* openSUSE Factory;
* openSUSE Tumbleweed (new).

On Banshee:Unstable (which should hold the unstable releases, currently 2.1.0) I’ll be introducing some changes during the next days which will feature:
* Package being renamed to ‘banshee’, thus dropping the current banshee-1;
* Migration to pkgconfig() calls for >= 1130;
* Packages banshee and banshee-core get merged into banshee (currently banshee had only 4 documentation files);
*  New sub-package banshee-common to hold all the architecture independent files (ex: text files, icons, etc);
* A few cleanups on the spec file for unsupported platforms (SLE11 and SLE11SP1 do not meet the requirements for this version and superior).

Once this is implemented and tested I will look into Banshee:Alpha and see the best way to start building daily/weekly snapshots using the OBS magic available and some magic tricks hidden in Dimstar’s sleeve which kindly accepted my request to give me a hand on such evil task.

In the future, on the next stable release (2.2.0), I’ll move the changes from Banshee:Unstable to Banshee and hopefully change the development repository to Banshee (as if Factory has the latest stable release it makes no sense in having Banshee’s development repository in Banshee:Unstable) and synch all at once.

Users subscribed to Banshee:Unstable repository might see some turbulence during the next days, while users subscribing now through the 1-Click installer will already be installing Banshee with the changes described above.

Well the GNOME Team are holding their regular meeting tomorrow Thursday 08 May 2008 @ 1600UTC/GMT/ZULU – or for those not quite with the whole “foreign” time thing try this.  One of the themes is the BitTorrent client, why am I saying this?  Well for all those that have an opinion about it, please come along and let everyone know what that is, yes there may be a chance to get on your soap box and denounce the world and it’s dog,  and we can have a real-time discussion about it.  If you don’t tell someone (preferably someone that makes decisions) then no one knows and nothing happens, filing bugs also helps

A bit of background reading on why the choice of monsoon was made can be found here – yes I did indeed do the initial review of clients and made the recommendation, and I’m sticking to it!  I did however get others to test it to confirm I’m not 100% insane.  As with all applications your mileage may vary, but we are intent in trying to make your mileage be the same great journey as one would expect from openSUSE.  So if you care, join in and you never know you may bring something to the table that no one thought of