I have been trying to get LTSP 5 working on SUSE lately and the very initial test packages are up.

Download and install kiwi-desc-ltsp > 0.1.9 from HERE:

You also require kiwi, kiwi-desc-netboot and kiwi-pxeboot from HERE:

Change the installation path in

/usr/share/kiwi/image/kwltsp-suse-10.2/config.xml

from “/mnt/iso” to your installation path.

Run as root

sh /usr/share/kiwi/image/kwltsp-suse-10.2/setup-ltsp.sh

If everything goes right this script should setup /opt/ltsp/suse, /etc/exports, sshkeys and netboot images.

Follow the output on screen.

PXE booting the client should get a LTSP Display Manager through which you can log in using any account created on the server. You also require to setup dhcp and a/tftp server.

You would need ssh server running, no running X required on the server.

The real work of porting all the LTSP 5 scripts to SUSE will start now, for that I require help.

Note: Do not use it on production environment.

After trying out KIWI, I am really impressed with it’s flexibility and ease of use in creating various images such as Stephan’s KDE4 Live (which incidentally has people going nuts over it with about 30 downloads going on at a time). KIWI has made it possible for everyone to create their own distro!

This led me to think how we can extend it a bit more and help us get LTSP 5 on SUSE. LTSP 5 is currently integrated only in Debian and Ubuntu, thanks to the great work by Jammcq, Ogra, Scott and others.

We have launched an effort to get LTSP 5 on SUSE. In that quest James Tremblay called an IRC Meeting to discuss how we can go about getting this task done. Within 24 hours Marcus Schaefer, the developer of KIWI project already implemented diskless client booting off from NFS shared chroot in KIWI, this was one of the features we requested. Now that is some very quick response by a SUSE engineer to community need.

Thanks to that we now have something like very early LTSP implementation, the major task of going through all the LTSP scripts and adapting them to suite SUSE will take some time and help from anyone who would like to contribute.

So if you are a developer and can spare some time for this project look us up on IRC #opensuse-kiwi or on Factory ML.

An update to my earlier post regarding an event we are organizing for our user group (Vibrant GNU/Linux User Group).

I sent an email to Novell about the event we are organizing and viola they sent me a box full of openSUSE 10.2 Dual Layer DVD. Thank you Rahul, Hitesh, Prakash, Sandeep and Khushal of Novell office Bombay for this gesture. Thank you AMD too for supporting this DVD.

So if you happen to be planning a massive promotion for your favorite distro, do write to your friendly Novell office close to you
Here is what it reads on the DVD jacket:

Lizard blizzard continues. Join in.

It’s a fact: your participation in the openSUSE project makes the best-engineered Linux even better. Help drive the future of Linux by joining openSUSE today at www.opensuse.org

- Become part of the openSUSE community

- Share knowledge

- Identify bugs

- Request enhancements

We are planning an event on 22 April here in Baroda, India. So if you happen to be in my town, please join us.

Will be showcasing latest in virtualization technologies and of course awesomeness of Compiz/Beryl.

Vibrant GNU/Linux User Group

Note: The following how-to might be obsolete by now, for more uptodate how-to please refer KIWI.pdf. Here is more recent how-to.

openSUSE KIWI toolkit is fantastic piece of work, congratulations to all the developers involved in creating this software. This is my first encounter with KIWI and I must say it rocks!

With KIWI we can build anything from live CD/DVD, thin client images, xen and other vm images to custom distributions.

Here is a short how to KIWI live, they are the things that I did to create my very first Live distro: XFCE based openSUSE 10.2.

Head to http://en.opensuse.org/LiveDVD

After installing all the required kiwi packages download this tarball. It contains modified configuration for live distro based on openSUSE 10.2. Extract the tarball anywhere, preferably in /usr/share/kiwi.

Change following parameters in config.xml according to your setup:

source path=”/mnt/iso”

Change the path to your installation source, in my case it was openSUSE-10.2 box DVD iso mounted at /mnt/iso.

package name=”whateveryouwant”

opensusePattern name=”whicheveryouwant”

For list of patterns see : http://en.opensuse.org/Patterns

Once you are done with selecting patterns and packages you want for your live distro run this command:

kiwi –root /tmp/mydvd –prepare /usr/share/kiwi/image/kwliveDVD-suse-10.2

Note: there are double hyphens in front of root and prepare)

This will take a while installing everything and will create a tree in /tmp/mydvd.

Edit /tmp/mydvd/etc/inittab to boot at runlevel 3 ( id:3:initdefault:). This was done as xdm does not offer the DE you want to log into and boots into fvwm. I am sure you can make it boot into xfce4, but I have not explored that yet.

You can customize the configuration in /tmp/mydvd as you like, like select default wallpapers, put some files on users desktop (/tmp/mydvd/home/linux/Desktop) etc. Once you are done run this command:

kiwi –create /tmp/mydvd -d /tmp

This will create an iso image /tmp/liveDVD-suse-10.2.i686-1.1.2.iso which you can burn on a disk or run directly using qemu or vmware. If you use qemu, make sure you have kqemu installed too.

qemu -m 256 -cdrom /tmp/liveDVD-suse-10.2.i686-1.1.2.iso -boot d

Once at login prompt login as user:linux, password: linux and run startxfce4

Finally the announcement is made that Compiz and Beryl communities will be joining forces.

Compiz, the core will be developed as it is currently, lead by David Reveman of Novell and hosted at the freedesktop.org, most of the Beryl developers now have commit access and are already porting over changes from Beryl.

Many of the Beryl plugins have been ported to work with Compiz and are temporarily hosted on git repository at beryl-project.org. Main technical difference between the ported plugins and plugins in Compiz core is the use of BCOP options instead of gconf schemas. There is no settings utility available yet for end user to customize preferences.

For the settings frontend a library is under heavy development called libbs which can use ini, gconf or kconfig backends to store user preferences. Its code can be fetched from here: http://gitweb.beryl-project.org/

We are obviously headed for much better composite desktop experience, wishing everyone the very best of luck.