I am very happy to announce that LTSP GUI, that I’d be mentoring along with Lars Rupp of openSUSE-EDU project, has been selected for this year’s Google Summer of Code through openSUSE project.

Announcement on http://news.opensuse.org

Jan Weber would be working on the project, here is the idea page:

http://en.opensuse.org/Easy-LTSP

Here are the mock-ups screenshots made by the student:

http://www.luckylemon.de/ltspgui/

Looking forward to all of your help and a successful project.

Wishing all the luck to Jan

Back from 6 days of Paragliding pilot training course (P1), logged 7 minutes of flying time.

Full album here.

Compiz Fusion Git packages got updated in home:cyberorg repository, this time it has a cool new effect “Cube Cylinder” from onestone. This picture would tell more.

Notice the details on the fishes, atlantis has received a lot of love too. Use compiz-git-all 1-click to get it. Note that these are unstable packages meant for testers and developers use only.

In other news, I went at the client’s place today for OpenOffice.org training, the lab setup that I required was not available, they had windows machine with OpenOffice.org installed which do not have all the goodies that Novell Edition that is available on openSUSE has.

So in a minute we converted one openSUSE 10.3 machine into a KIWI-LTSP server, PXE booted all the 10 clients from the server and the training session was safely conducted on that

April 12 and 13, 2008 we organized a Symposium on Open Source Software at the Computer Center, Maharaja Sayajirao University(MSU) of Baroda, Vadodara, India. The event was attended, well over our capacity, by varied group such as students, educators, professionals working in industries around Baroda.

Thanks to Sandeep Menon, Novell India, for sending excellent kits for all the participants. Huge thanks also goes to Dr Dhanesh Patel, the symposium Director, Mr Vinay Pandya, Mr Devendra Jadav, Mr Kishor Gorasia - the symposium co-ordinators, Mr Dhaval Pancholi, Mr Brijesh Bhatt, Mr Ambrish Vadnekar, the technical team of the Computer Center for setting up entire IT infrastructure required, Mr Sandip for handling all our accounting and Punjabhai and all the other staff of the centre for their contributions.

The event inauguration panel consisted of the Chief Guest, Mrs Shobhna Jain, the Director General of the Railway Staff College, presided by the MSU Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor S M Joshi and the guest of honor Mr Ashok Shah, IT head of Modern Petrofils.

The training sessions were conducted by Mr Vinay Pandya and Mr Devendra Jadav on MySQL administration on openSUSE, Mr Nilesh Vaghela on Mailserver and Clustering on Red Hat Linux, Mr Ashish Bhavalkar on Squid proxy server on openSUSE and Oracle 10g implementation on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and sessions on Virtualization and Thin Client Computing using KIWI-LTSP on openSUSE by me. We will be putting up online, the slides and other documentations given to the participants.

Professor Bhuvan Parekh, the Dean, the Faculty of Engineering and Technology presided over the closing ceremony.

I would not be doing the review of the event instead here is the review by Ishan, one of the participating students to give you an idea about how the event went (btw, yaar with any number of ‘a’ means ‘friends’).

Here is the walk-through of the event in pictures.

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday tried building Compiz Fusion git packages, compiz-fusion-plugins-git packages, that has new cmake build system, are broken in home:cyberorg repo

Thursday getting everything organised for Symposium on Open Source Software this Saturday and Sunday

Phew!

Dennis “onestone” Kasprzyk announced the release of Compiz 0.7.4 followed by an announcement of Compiz Fusion 0.7.4 release from Guillaume “iXce” Seguin.

Here is the major changes in Compiz from the last release:

• Configurable handling of overlapping output devices.
• Enhanced focus stealing prevention with configurable amount of focus stealing prevention.
• Added configurable, optional delay for edge actions to prevent accidental invocation.
• Generalized vertex system to improve plugin compatibility.
• Optimized Gaussian blur shader to support more hardware.

Highlight of Compiz Fusion release are:

• Expo has a new transformation mode: “Curve”
• New plugin: bicubic, which adds shader based bicubic filtering to improve the quality of scaled textures
• CCSM got Improved look of edge and button selector widgets and Advanced Search rewrite
• simple-ccsm got little enhancements: Added expo plugin to effects page, widget to configure global edge settings, and ed ‘mag’ plugin as ‘area zoom’ to zoom page

As always  packages for openSUSE are available via 1-click install from the openSUSE Build Service X11:XGL replository,  for more information of how to install or set everything up, see http://en.opensuse.org/Compiz_Fusion