This was my first visit to Hyderabad, the trip was great, it was full of ancient monuments, pearls, meeting of open source geeks, biryani and a lot of rain. I did two sessions at the event, one on openSUSE 11.0 installation and another on KIWI-LTSP. We PXE booted up the entire lab into KDE 4.1  from my laptop. of my talk.

I also met with a lot of students, open source enthusiast, fellow speakers from different parts of the country. Special thanks to Krish and his team for taking good care of all of us.

Click here for the entire album.

Tuxmaniac’s report.

Vidya’s report

Everyones presentations

* Release Announcement with a lot of useful information

* Sneak Peeks at Plethora of Improvements

* openSUSE 11.0 makes Compiz Fusion easy

* On Digg

Last week openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 3 was released, very early development release of what is to come in form of openSUSE 11.0 just a couple of months later.

On 11.0 release there is a plenty of choice for desktop effects, there is Compiz with all Compiz Fusion enhancements, there is KWin4 a composited window manager for KDE. To enable users to easily get their window manager of choice activated, openSUSE’s Stefan Dirsch and xorg team have worked to enable AIGLX by default on supported hardwares, and upon the installation of 1-click for binary blob drivers.

To enable Compiz, Rodrigo is working on “Desktop Effects” tab in gnome’s control-center “Appearance” caplet that would make it really easy to turn on effects. He is also working on getting something that is usable by all distributions in upstream gnome.

Adrian Schröter made an announcement on the openSUSE Build-Service(OBS) ML that OBS now supports storage of .ymp files which makes ‘one-click’ installation of patterns (group of pacakges) possible.

This announcement ties in with one of the long list enhancements going on over at www.opensuse.org, which incidentally got a new home page with a mischievous message developer left in it’s source
New portal was also launched last week news.opensuse.org that should keep you all up to speed with whatever is going on in and around SUSE world, this makes a very good ‘official’ addition to Planet SUSE maintained by James Ogley where blogs of all the people involved with SUSE are syndicated.

Very soon we are to have a software portal where you can go and install anything you want directly by clicking in the browser. Work is already underway and you can install KDE4, Pidgin, Multimedia support etc using Benji’s one-click installer(does not work with the latest metapackage handler) from HERE.

Get and install the latest YaST2 meta package handler for your version of openSUSE, open konqueror and click on any of the .ymp from here:

KDE4

Compiz and Compiz-Fusion (see also this link)

Currently one-click works out of box with konqueror only, to use it with firefox you can do the following:

Create a file called /sbin/FirefoxMPHandler containing:

#!/bin/bash
/sbin/YaST2 OneClickInstallUI $@

change it’s permission: chmod +x /sbin/FirefoxMPHandler

Click on .ymp and select ‘Open With’ -> /sbin/FirefoxMPHandler -> ‘Do this for file like this from now on’

Note: Firefox instructions are temporary only, it should be fixed by 10.3 release so you would not have to do that at all ;).

For systemwide association you can put this in /etc/mailcap:

YMP;/sbin/FirefoxMPHandler

If you are a packager on OBS, create and upload some patterns we can click and install.

Have fun with it!

Edit: Preview of the software portal with one click install is already here: http://software.opensuse.org

Please note that the metapackage handler has changed and the above instructions of manually launching it may not work anymore.

Here are jotting down some of the ideas about the role that Beryl should be looking to play in future of Linux Desktop development.

Leave the core to Compiz project to develop and maintain.

I don’t believe core is the identity of Beryl or any major work by the project has gone into it to say we cannot give up its maintenance. Compiz project maintaining the core and Beryl developers helping improve it would serve several purposes that I will list down shortly.

Compiz core should be treated as infrastructure like x.org that we are using to meet our aims. Obvious question that would arise out of this is what is the identity of Beryl if we don’t duplicate core work?

I suggest redefining ourselves and creating another niche for Beryl than to compete and duplicate efforts of Compiz project. There are more important things we can put our efforts into and make Linux Desktop pleasure to use for everybody.

Some time back some developers floated idea of creating another Desktop Environment around composited WM, I think we can aim for something close to it, but not quite full DE.

Same as GNU applications and Linux kernel makes up GNU/Linux OS, we could aim for being something like GNU. Beryl should focus on the following to accomplish that goal and define its place.

1. Create repository of all sorts of plugins, usability as well as eyecandy ones. Let them be known as Beryl-plugins with dependency on Compiz-core. Let’s not just stop at that.

2. Brings together various projects such as kiba-dock, gnome-dock, Awn, Screenlets etc creating a project with such components that has compositing as fundamental requirement.
3. There are some fantastic ideas here on Gnome 3 and KDE 4 goal pages, we can help achieve those.

These are just personal ideas, please don’t take it as official Beryl road map, I just think we should move on from where we started.

I am sure many of you would have other ideas of what we can/should do, do share (no flame wars please ;)).

Have a lot of fun!

I gave kde4 from openSUSE Build Service repository a try and here are the screenies to compare the two. More on it later.

(click to enlarge)

KDE 3.5

KDE 4