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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

  more screenshots…

Softwares for mathematics, chemistry, astronomy etc, servers like KIWI-LTSP, Fedena school ERP, Moodle course management etc., full multimedia, graphics, office suite, many popular programming languages including AMP stack, java, C, C++, python, ruby, latest stable Gnome and KDE desktop environments and lot more is packed in this release. More about softwares included here.

To know more about openSUSE Education project, file bugs, request enhancements, participate, or to get in touch with us visit Education Portal.

Create live USB stick or DVD with this image. About 15GB disk space and 1GB RAM is required for installation, more is better. Please note that we release 32bit image only, for users with RAM 4G or more install and use kernel-pae package.

Happy holidays…

Hosted at sourceforge.net

Direct Download | md5sum

Hosted at opensuse-education.org

Direct Download | new metalink | old metalink | md5sum | torrent

Use download manager or Metalink client such as aria2c for most efficient way to download.

DazukoFS is a stack-able filesystem for virus scanning, here is how it works:

Install clamav, clamav-db and dazukofs, dazukofs-kmp-yourkernelflavor via 1-click.

Edit /etc/clamd.conf to change these parameters (change only these two parameters, nothing else there):

User root
ClamukoScanOnAccess yes

Edit /etc/fstab to mount the folder/s you would like to scan on access. So if /home is on /dev/sda2, there will be another line for /home in fstab, this will effectively mount /home twice, one normal way and another as dazukofs.

/home /home dazukofs defaults 0 0

Run the following commands as root in terminal:

insserv boot.dazukofs
insserv clamd
/etc/init.d/boot.dazukofs start
mount -a
rcclamd start
freshclam

Test it out with eicar, there will be message like this in /var/log/mail if you try to copy eicar.com to user’s home:

clamd[4734]: Clamuko: /home/username/eicar.com: Eicar-Test-Signature FOUND

I don’t know how to get the files with virus detected to quarantine, let me know if anyone knows how to do that.

Since the previous post, I worked on improving the patches that add local caching, fixed a few bugs, addressed review comments from the community and re-posted the patches. I also gave a talk about it at the SUSE Labs Conference 2010 took place at Prague. The slides can be found here: FS-Cache aware CIFS.

This patchset was merged in the upstream Linux kernel yesterday (Yay!) which means this feature would be available starting from kernel version 2.6.35-rc1.

The primary aim of caching data on the client side is to reduce the network calls to the CIFS Server whenever possible, thereby reducing the server load as well the network load. This will indirectly improve the performance and the scalability of the CIFS Server and will improve the number of clients per Server ratio. This feature could be useful in a number of scenarios:

– Render farms in Entertainment industry – used to distribute textures to individual rendering units
– Read only multimedia workloads
– Accelerate distributed web-servers
– Web server cluster nodes serve content from the cache
– /usr distributed by a network file system – to avoid spamming Servers when there is a power outage
– Caching Server with SSDs reexporting netfs data
– where a persistent cache remains across reboots is useful

However, be warned that local caching may not suitable for all workloads and a few workloads could suffer a slight performance hit (for e.g. read-once type workloads). So, you need to careful consider your workload/scenario before you start using local disk caching.

When I reposted this patchset, I got asked whether I have done any benchmarking and could share the performance numbers. Here are the results from a 100Mb/s network:

Environment
————

I’m using my T60p laptop as the CIFS server (running Samba) and one of my test machines as CIFS client, connected over an ethernet of reported speed 1000 Mb/s. ethtool was used to throttle the speed to 100 Mb/s. The TCP bandwidth as seen by a pair of netcats between the client and the server is about 89.555 Mb/s.

Client has a 2.8 GHz Pentium D CPU with 2GB RAM
Server has a 2.33GHz Core2 CPU (T7600) with 2GB RAM

Test
—–
The benchmark involves pulling a 200 MB file over CIFS to the client using cat to /dev/zero under `time’. The wall clock time reported was recorded.

First, the test was run on the server twice and the second result was recorded (noted as Server below i.e. time taken by the Server when file is loaded on the RAM).
Secondly, the client was rebooted and the test was run with caching disabled (noted as None below).
Next, the client was rebooted, the cache contents (if any) were erased with mkfs.ext3 and test was run again with cachefilesd running (noted as COLD)
Next the client was rebooted, tests were run with caching enabled this time with a populated disk cache (noted as HOT).
Finally, the test was run again without unmounting or rebooting to ensure pagecache remains valid (noted as PGCACHE).

The benchmark was repeated twice:

Cache (state) Run #1 Run#2
============= ======= =======
Server 0.104 s 0.107 s
None 26.042 s 26.576 s
COLD 26.703 s 26.787 s
HOT 5.115 s 5.147 s
PGCACHE 0.091 s 0.092 s

As it can be seen when the disk cache is hot, the performance is roughly 5X times than reading over the network. And, it has to be noted that the Scalability improvement due to reduced network traffic cannot be seen as the test involves only a single client and the Server. The read performance with more number of clients would be more interesting as the cache can positively impact the scalability.