One of the major hacking festival is underway at Novell offices across the globe. With the announcement of Hack Week, a very cool Idea Portal was also announced, where anyone can post their ideas, request help, vote on ideas that they find appealing or work on any idea that they like.

Christoph Thiel has posted an idea about integrating LTSP with SUSE, a project I had been working since last couple of months. If you feel, schools and education institutions should be able to run openSUSE on low end diskless clients, please go and vote for it and better still join the team to make it happen.

Hold your breadth and click on this image.

Yup, that is Buddha meditating on the gears inside the cube. Yet another amazing work from compiz developer, Onestone.

See Compiz-Fusion Community News for more exciting information.

If you are running openSUSE 10.2 follow these steps to get test packages of compiz-git, compiz-fusion-plugins and CompizConfig Settings Manager.

Be warned that these are test packages, so package names and many other things will change shortly. For everyday use I would advise not to install these packages and wait for proper release. There is absolutely no guarantee that these packages will work on your system.

1. As root run rpm -e compiz compiz-gnome compiz-kde (Remove previous compiz install completely)

2. download and install yast2-meta-package-handler

3. Fire up konqueror and click on this:

4. Launch compiz with the following command once installation is done (double dashes in front of replace):

compiz –replace ccp &

Start new settings manager:

ccsm &

Select all the plugins you like including “decoration” plugin, Add “your(changethis)-window-decorator –replace” as command string under ‘decoration’ plugin. Set ‘Focus Effect’ to ‘Dodge’.

If anyone has problem using these packages on Xgl, please update Mesa from this repository: XORG72

This is what you would get.

Jakub I am using Tango icons this time around
Edit: Please use the latest yast2-metapackage-handler from the build service repository only.

Jiri Suchomel has created YaST module that makes creating KIWI images breeze, here are the steps to create your own live distro. As mentioned earlier, on other posts, you can choose to create Xen and other virtual machine images too.

The module is quite self explanatory, but here are the steps anyway.

Run yast2 product-creator after installing the YaST module.

Select the image you want to build.

After adding additional repositories like Guru, packman, nvidia and others Select patterns/packages you want on your distro.

You can add default users and that is about it, click on “Create ISO” and you have your own distribution with all the goodies you need.

The module is in very early stage of development, but it clearly shows the promise of making system imaging approachable to everyday user. Bugs reports, enhancement request can be made to Jiri Suchomel, see http://en.opensuse.org/KIWI for details.

Have fun!

A new merged community around Compiz project would be known as Compiz-Fusion, details of the announcement here on Compiz Mailing List.

It is not just a new name, quitely behind the scenes developers have been working hard and have come up with some stunning enhancements.

Zoom plugin has been almost rewritten by David Reveman with cool new features like select and zoom and panning, Cube has got reflection thanks to great work by Onestone, there is now expo mode that can be used along with Cube.

Size information upon resizing any window, paint fire on your desktop and other countless useful and no so useful features have been added to plugins. We also got new animation effect “Dodge”, one of my favourite.

Compiz also now has two settings tool, users can easily tweak compiz settings to their liking.

Here is hot new name:

Q: Can KIWI help create a customized openSUSE with NVidia/ATI/Prop drivers and full MP3/MPEG/DVD support?

A: Absolutely you can, just add all the rpm sources in kiwi’s configuration and add the packages you need on your spin. The best part is you can create liveCD/DVD, installable media, or even virtual machine images.

Now you can have a build server of your own, without delving into all the documentations in the OBS source.

Jan-Simon Möller aka dl9pf informs us over at the openSUSE Build Service Mailing List that the build server is now available as VMware virtual appliance.

Tnx to bernadl who provides the hosting, here is an VMware-image
(openSUSE 10.2 as base) with OBS preinstalled. The next steps are
described inside the README.html on the Desktop.

Have Phun !

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/924

So go get it guys and have phun building packages for your preferred Linux distribution.

Just updated kiwi-desc-ltsp to make setting up LTSP5 a bit easier.

changelog :

• Add SERVER_IP to the setup-ltsp.sh script
• Add dhcp-server and pulseaudio dep
• Add pulseaudio to the chroot required for future audio/sound integration on LTSP clients

Here are the instructions to help you set up kiwi-ltsp.