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Just around the corner is the openSUSE Community Week, May 11 – 17, 2009.  This will be a week of total awesomeness!  I highly recommend stopping by and learning as much as you can.  There will be plenty of really cool community people there to help you learn all kinds of things that you have been meaning to learn!

There will also be the chance to contribute back and maybe even bug that developer about your bug that has been bugging you or even find new bugs.

So, be sure to come out and hang out with some really awesome people for a week of awesomeness, because it will be awesome!

openSUSE Community Week details

Note: I really couldn’t have said it better than Stephen Shaw

I am happy to present you another round of update from the KIWI-LTSP team.

Enhancements and bugfixes from the last announcement are as below:

* Enabled compcache by default now, so clients with low memory should see improved performance. Thanks to Takashi Iwai for the packages.

* KIWI-LTSP server should now work better if there is another DHCP server running in the network, thanks to KIWI’s kiwiserver=serverIP feature.

* Boot and system images are created with openSUSE 11.1 updates.

All of this and lot more will be in next openSUSE-Edu-KIWI-LTSP-Live DVD.

Happy thin computing…

The first batch of school teachers from the Baroda High School completed a two day “Introduction to Linux and OpenOffice” training. The teachers were from all 4 schools of the group with about 10000 students(almost the size of a small university). openSUSE-Education will be reaching that many new users from this year onwards.

Presentation slides are. I’ve tried to put together slides that covers all aspects of Gujarat State Education Board’s(GSEB) Linux and Open Source curriculum for 11th and 12th standards. Share it with all the teachers you know

The OpenOffice slides are from here.

The course ware to use when teaching/give to students is available here: Book 1 and Book 2.

All the participants of the course took home hot new openSUSE-Edu live DVDs.

Enjoy!

Edit: You’d need to click on post link to see embedded video if reading this from planets. More videos here.

..or download on steroids and how to update gigabytes of isos without downloading whole of it again and again.

In India good internet connection is quite expensive, to download 2GB iso it takes me about 15 hours. Here is what I do to optimize the download speed available.

Use metalinks:

Get the “metalink” from the download repository, for example openSUSE-Edu repo.

aria2c http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Education/images/iso/$IMAGE_NAME.iso.metalink

This will use multiple mirrors to download the iso. Replace $IMAGE_NAME to actual image.

If you click on “mirrors” on any openSUSE repository, you will see nice little tip:

Hint: For larger downloads, a Metalink client is best — easier, more reliable, self healing downloads.

aria2c is a CLI metalink client, download from network:utilities repo. You can configure firefox to use aria2c to download files too.

Use Rsync:

Now what happens in open source world is things improve/update by the time download of huge files complete here. Here is how downloaded iso images can be updated without redownloading new one.

Use your favorite mirror that provides rsync, see the list of mirros providing rsync connection.

Check the availability of the image you want on the mirror by running:

rsync rsync://mirror.leaseweb.com/opensuse/repositories/Education/images/iso/

Copy old image with exactly same name as new image available:

cp oldimage.iso exact-name-new-image-is.iso

Run rsync again to patch it:

rsync -avP rsync://mirror.leaseweb.com/opensuse/repositories/Education/images/iso/exact-name-new-image-is.iso .

Dot at the end with space before it is part of the command.

This will download only the bytes that have changed, which in some cases is just few MBs, saving few GBs of download.

Hello Community

openSUSE Education team is proud to announce the first ever openSUSE Education and KIWI-LTSP live/installable server DVD.

The DVD is created using openSUSE Build Service, a free and open source multi-distribution collaborative packaging platform and openSUSE distribution builder. The build service uses the same KIWI imaging technology to create live DVD we use to create kiwi-ltsp images.

The DVD contains fully pre-configured, ready to run KIWI-LTSP server with tons of applications from openSUSE Education repository. It also has the updates to all packages since the 11.1 release. With the KIWI-LTSP server you can PXE(network) boot other PCs to use this live DVD without installing or modifying anything on them. Booting from hard disk again will leave those PCs as they were.

Selection of very useful softwares for students as well as educators in the DVD are:

bluefish    TuxMathScrabble    xlogo    xdrawchem
tuxtype    tuxpaint    tuxmath    stellarium    stardict
plutimikation    piklab    openbabel    octave    nvu
ktechlab    ksociograma    ksimus    kseg    knoda
klogic    klavaro     kdissert   gnome-chemistry-utils
k3dsurf    jMemorize    gramofile    gnucap
gcompris    galculator    fluidsynth    eclipse    dynamips
chemtool    celestia    canorus    bwbasic    brainworkshop
bibletime    avogadro    atomix    XaraLX    TuxWordSmith
MultiplicationStation    italc     drgeo    childsplay    bluej
xboard    vym    qcad    pysycache    netbeans    littlewizard
knights    klogoturtle    kding    kdeedu3    gelemental

Apart from the whole of Gnome with hundreds of other applications.

Get it from here.

Users to log in from terminals are linux1-linux5, password is linux. As the DVD is meant to demonstrate KIWI-LTSP the IP address of the eth0 is set as 10.0.0.254, you can modify to your environment after installation. To test iTalc with LTSP, “su -” to root and run “italc-launcher”.

As this is the first release, feedback, suggestions, bug reports would be highly appreciated. It would be great if all LTSP developers give it a try and comment on our way of the implementation of their hard work. The DVD will be improved/fine tuned further over the next few months.

Special thanks to the repository maintainers for all the hard work on Education project. Robert “bud313″ Lewis for testing the DVD.

Digg this!

Have a lot of fun…

Your openSUSE Education team

Update: This is perhaps the first distribution that has Moonshine making it possible to play Microsoft WMA/V out of box legally on GNU/Linux :).

On behalf of Compiz developers and the super smart guys at Novell-Microsoft Interop lab, I am happy to announce the easy way to get Compiz for Windows users.

Download Compiz for Windows users.

Run the .exe file, follow the familiar on screen wizard, reboot, that simple.

Special thanks to Jordi Massaguer Pla and his team for making this possible.

Here is another great use of Compiz(sic), you can now spin openSUSE installer cube.

Applications from the students are being accepted since last few days, I’d share a little secret if you are a student planning to work hard and have fun at the same time this summer(get big bucks of course) your chances of getting project with openSUSE is quite high so start sending in your proposals. Check out list of ideas on openSUSE Summer of Code ideas page.

Why your chances are very high? well there are tons of interesting ideas to work on and too few good applications till now. Sending applications early mean you get mentors giving more time to go through your application, it gets lot more views every time mentors logs in their control center and you get lot more time to discuss and fine tune your ideas before submission deadline.

Good luck!

It is that time of year again, students can choose the project they like to work on, get mentored by some of the most experienced contributers in open source world and surprisingly, thanks to Google, get paid USD4500 for all the fun(learning)!!

Last year’s mentoring experience was excellent, I had a privilege of working with a very bright student Jan Weber who worked on creating easy to use LTSP configuration tool: Easy-LTSP.

This year, I have proposed a project on Integrating HPC in KIWI-LTSP. Students with super hacker capabilities who have worked on similar technologies before get in touch with me to discuss anything related to the project.There is a list of other great openSUSE  projects on offer here.

I would like to see a lot of students from India apply this year, especially from all the IITs.

Update: Just discovered ##gsoc-india and google group to go with it.