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

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…

* Install Li-f-e on a server from which other machines will PXE boot, make sure you have plenty of space assigned to / partition(about 20G)
* Set up LTSP by following this quick start guide
* Create /srv/nfs folder and copy Li-f-e iso there
* Run the following as root in terminal:

mount /srv/nfs/openSUSE-Edu-li-f-e.x86_64-42.1.1.iso /mnt
cp /mnt/boot/x86_64/loader/linux /srv/tftpboot/boot/linux-life64
cp /mnt/boot/x86_64/loader/initrd /srv/tftpboot/boot/initrd-life64
echo "/srv/nfs *(ro,no_root_squash,async,no_subtree_check)" >> /etc/exports
cat <<EOF>> /srv/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default
LABEL Li-f-e
kernel boot/linux-life64
append initrd=boot/initrd-life64 isofrom_device=nfs:10.0.0.254:/srv/nfs/ isofrom_system=/openSUSE-Edu-li-f-e.x86_64-42.1.1.iso
IPAPPEND 2
EOF
chkconfig rpcbind on && service rpcbind restart
chkconfig nfsserver on && service nfsserver restart

Now you can PXE boot any machine over the network, select Li-f-e from the end of the boot menu to boot live DVD iso instead of normal LTSP session.

Use “yast2 live-installer” to install Li-f-e on the client machine.

  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.

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.