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

What is license for?

Wear your tin-hats and make securing spells because here we go. In modern world everything is for sale and everything you can image will be stolen and in-incorporated in nuclear bomb or used in mass destruction of human beings. This ain’t new feature in human society. For example fire have been probably one man thing for long time (and I can just imagine how many jokes you can make about that poor fellow and that even poorer soul that first roasted something) after a while it widespread all over the world and same goes with wheel. They were invented somewhere and someone took them in use without giving a dime to the inventor. Is it fair? No it’s not. Bit harsh and unfair to this original guy but again this is how ball is played.

What this is related to licensing and what is the big deal of open source and free software anyway if this the Status Quo? What are the licenses for? Believe or not they are important agreements! It’s not secret that most of the Github repositories are still without proper license. That is why they launch: http://choosealicense.com/. Take time and study a bit or if you don’t have a time I’ll tell how I see things.

Free software

There is Free Software movement which is constructed around GNU project and FSF (Free Software Foundation). Most significant person in Free software is Richard Stallman (Yes that hansom guy with a beard) . If you want more history please read it from FSF site they know it more better than me. Main principals in Free software are Freedom, Freedom to share and make sure that everyone else have that freedom also.

Free Software licenses are commonly known as Copyleft licenses and most know is Gnu Public license (Actually version 3.0 ain’t that popular). All these licenses share a same thing. You will always have 4 freedoms:

• Freedom 0 – the freedom to use the work
• Freedom 1 – the freedom to study the work
• Freedom 2 – the freedom to copy and share the work with others
• Freedom 3 – the freedom to modify the work, and the freedom to distribute modified and therefore derivative works.

What this means (and I’m not a lawyer so don’t blame me if you get sued) is that you can make your changes to code, used it in nuclear bomb but if you release your bomb to big public (or make it available only in machine readable form) you must release also the code changes you have made to original code. There is eternal fight do these changes have to be delivered to upstream project and do they have to be suitable to attach into original code base.

This why every distribution is releasing their source packages (which ain’t bad thing at all) because GPL demands it. Copyleft tries to make sure you will get source code of binary if you demand it but it can be made available only for those who demand it and even in printed out form as A4 papers.

Copyleft there different opinions how these license articles really apply and there is plenty of violations like Allwinner. Still most of them a settled out of the court. One of the biggest GPL (which wasn’t about GPL license at all) that get in the court was (or is it still?) Linux kernel vs SCO. It was only possible because code was freely available and everyone could study it.

Because you didn’t read the anything above. Remember one thing Copyleft is VERY restrictive license. If you are using some library which is using Copyleft license of any form and you doing in-house development make sure you apply license demands before releasing your work or it could get real nasty. Main thing is: you have the right to use the source but same time you have to provide everyone else the same rights and no this doesn’t mean you have to have version control or bug tracker.

Puppy projects: Linux, Libreoffice, Blender and GIMP

Open source

Open Source licenses are widespread and there is plenty more of them than there is Copyleft licenses. How they compare Copyleft? Open Soure licenses tend to give you all rights so they are more liberal. Most popular licenses are MIT, Apache License 2.0 and BSD license. Why they are popular? It’s because they are simple and all these three gives you right to do what ever you want with these files and choose you want to contribute back. If you choose some not popular license you have to make sure you are compatible with GPL without that there is no game.

Why even have license then if you don’t care what people do with your stuff? Choosing liberate Open Source license is not letting everyone ‘steal’ your work it’s about making sure that they know what they can do with it and you are the owner of the rights. Project without any license or release as Public domain is most dangerous ever because you don’t know is this some kind of bomb project that author is waiting to spread and then he or she is making demand on court with statement ‘hey I have this code on Internet and this my new EULA! GIVE ME YOU €€€ (or $$$ sometimes £££) YOU FEALTY ROBBERS!’. These licenses most cases tell what kind of warranty you have and every time it’s next to nothing.

Why then choose Open Source license and not the Free Software? It’s about the attitude: Freedom makes freedom happen. With Free Software you are forced to be free and with Open Source you can choose what is your freedom level and of course you need something to fight about.

Puppy projects: Docker, FreeBSD, Apache HTTP server

What about something else that is not code

Back in days creative works was a weak spot of licensing. Free Software and Open Source license are very fitting to code but they are not very well fitting to creative work. This is why Creative Commons (commonly known as CC) was created. There is suitable licenses for sharing you images, writings or what ever. They have Copyleft style licenses and then more liberal ones. Take you time and find what fits to your project.

Lengthy post but nothing much to said

I think I’ll rest my case here. Next time I think I’ll post about contributing code and remember these are my OWN observations. If they are incorrect please let me know or if you hate me because I like Systemd and liberal licenses you can tell that too. Remember it’s your project and you can choose any license in the world you like.

Hello Beijing and lovely people of openSUSE, I will be reaching there tomorrow, will be at Green Tree Inn close to the summit venue, packing some “sightseeing” before the event, if you are also there early drop me a line . There is a short talk about openSUSE Education scheduled on 19th. Check out the summit website to find out what other interesting stuff is on offer.

See you soon…

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

Hello world

Hello world is small application that programmer tends to start with when learning new programming language. It’s just something that prints ‘Hello World’-string in console. It’s good starting point to learn new programming language as in compiling languages you get the idea how to make application run.
Github is the programming project hosting place that uses git. If you adventurous you can see all the language ‘Hello World’ programs from this Github page. Just click them around and see that every program has the same idea. If you have no clue what all this means don’t feel bad! I hope in some point of you openSUSE hacking time you probably get back there and understand value of that small application.
In C-Language ‘Hello World’ looks like this:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
printf("Hello World\n");
return 0;
}

Copy these sentences as they are to ‘helloworld.c‘ file with pico, nano, vim, emacs, gedit, kate or some other text editor. Pay some attention where you save that ‘helloworld.c’. Easiest place would be you home dirs root /home/’yourusername’/. I won’t tell you want all this C-language means if you are interested please read how to get along with C and you see how easy language C really is.

Compiling

If you have used PHP, Python, Bash or Perl (maybe Ruby) in other words some programming language that doesn’t need compiling you are point of life to take a deep breath. If you have ever touched any programming language you in my position when I was 16 and started typing in Borland Turbo C++ and take event deeper breath. If you have used Microsoft Visual Studio and which is incredible piece of IDE and you tell yourself you know something about programming you take mild breathe and zip of water. Only problem with IDEs is you never know how the magic happens behind the scenes. Specially Visual Studio is very very good make you application just compile and in most of the cases that is what you want right?
There is some cases you need to get in the bottom and understand basic of compiling process. I tell one example from my life. In some point of my life I was ext in Nokia (Way before it was Microsoft owned phone company) and their phone build scripts were in HP-UX or AIX (can’t remember anymore sorry). There were nearly ‘NaN’ of people who understand how these Makefile scripts worked (they were mostly very cryptic cross compile Makefile stuff) and they just saw my fellow ext-buddy sitting there behind his desk. They gave these scripts to this poor fellow and weeks he cried, moaned and felt pain in his brains from compiling extremely complicated application. In the end he did it. He made those build scripts to work because he understand how compiling and linking was actually made and if I’m not wrong he got work place from Nokia for years to come.
Now I Cut the sentimental crap and tell how to compile program. It’s easy go to directory you have created ‘helloworld.c‘ and write this in console

gcc -o helloworld helloworld.c

was it so hard? In setence ‘gcc‘ is GNU C Compiler and paramter ‘-o‘ is application binary name (choose wisely young badawan it will write over your files if have same file name).

Run program

Running the program isn’t hard at all. Stay in directory that program is and write to console

./helloworld
Hello World

Now you have compiled you first program. Next we look at RPM devel packages and using libraries and headers. Remember ‘./’ is very needed in front this example because you want to run application from your current location.

This program was initiated by the Government of Indonesia with the objective to introduce the open source and e-learning method to student and teacher. So three years ago I was contacted to help them to realize their dream, and here I’m now reporting that there are around 7300 openSUSE installation in 350 elementary and junior-high schools. We also use SLES in servers to provide repositories and e-learning materials in SCORM using Moodle.  This is work in progress. We educate teachers to use openSUSE and also creating learning material so it is always in beta stage I think

I want to say thank you to all the good people, my friends and co-workers, they are unknown in openSUSE community, even many of them are not subscribing the mailing list, but they are the true openSUSE ambassadors in Indonesia. They come to schools and persuade the teachers to use openSUSE. Without them this dream will never come true. Picture below show some of them smiling holding the openSUSE 12.1 promo DVD that AJ sent to me. You all great! Also picture of teachers while following our session about openSUSE.

All the good people

Teachers train using openSUSE

Finally we welcome everyone in openSUSE community if you want to visit Indonesia don’t forget to pay a visit to one of this schools in Yogyakarta and you will see how student are happy using it

  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.

Well, the “problem” is, that our Education team is currently more a team of technical specialists and many work is done behind the scenes without communication to “the outside”. So even if you did not hear from us for some weeks, we are still alive and coding!

Here are just a few examples, that are going on behind the scenes:

• Translation of the new openSUSE Education Portal is work in progress. Many thanks to our contributors Guillaume for the Français, Freek de Kruijf for the Nederlands, Sabarth for the Português, Gankov for the Русский (Russian) Portal translation!
• Kirill is currently reviewing all 425(!) packages in the Build Service Education project and submitting them to openSUSE Factory afterwards – so openSUSE 12.1 will come with a huge set of packages directly inside the official repository.
• Cyberorg is working on the next release of the openSUSE Edu Li-f-e DVD with the LTSP integration.
• Anubusg1 and many others (the project currently lists 44 maintainers) are doing the “normal” packaging stuff like upgrading and fixing packages for 12.1 (aka Factory)

The Desktop4Education project from Austria was again present at the Conference and gave a great overview of the current status of the project during their talk. Good to hear that the project is being frequently used as a reference case by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture and as such promoted by them throughout Austria.

Talking with Andre Massing from the Simula Research Laboratory during his talk at the conference was quite interesting. Looks like the Science project might see some very interesting new packages in the next months. During the discussion, we agree that the Education and the Science project can share a lot of efforts in their project setups and organization. But they will stay separated (at least in the Build Service) as their audience is very different, even if they share some packages (which is currently done via links inside the Build Service).

Well, this is the tough job. I work with some expert, teacher and education strategist to prepare the e-learning system. We should prepare learning/teaching material in digital format, train the teacher to use authoring tools and operating system, and prepare the schools to be ready to receive the PC’s. This government initiative will involve 500 schools in 3 years. Every school that involve in this program will receive 21 PCs.

We select openSUSE Li-f-e as the operating system in every pc. The selection is not because I’m an openSUSE member but we come to the conclusion that openSUSE Li-f-e is the most complete and well prepare distribution for education (well, I convince other expert, some of them are Ph.D, he..he…). This year there are 110 schools involve in this program, this means another new 2310 openSUSE installation and more than 4000 new users if we assume that every PC will be used by 2 students.

Not only give PC to schools we also should connect the schools to the provincial data center. This is really challenging task, some areas of this province is covered by hundred of hills with karst topography and with no terestrial internet connection. Many of the schools is in that area. The road ahead still far away and difficult, but see the face of the children who really enthusiast with the openSUSE make me really happy.

There are more picture on my picasaweb

http://picasaweb.google.com/RICARDO.A.CHUNG/CaracteristicasYVentajasOpenSUSESuRelacionConNOVELLYLaComunidad#

openSUSE, Ambassador, Panama, FIEC, UP

openSUSE, Ambassador, Univ. Panama, FIEC