Great news for the owners of on-board Radeon X1200/1250 Series graphics, fglrx is not required to run Compiz. We can finally become completely “free”. We are using open source radeonhd drivers developed by SUSE engineers on the latest Xorg release.

Changed the following in xorg.conf and viola Compiz is running here!!

Section “Device”
Option “DRI” “1″ #and this works even with radeonhd drivers

Thanks to whoever is responsible for this

Update: Sndirsch just informs that this will be default on openSUSE 11.1, so probably right  from Beta 2 Compiz should work out of box on the hardwares using radeonhd drivers.

An addon DVD for openSUSE 11.0 with everything that is required for educational institutes is now available.

With this addon, openSUSE 11.0 is the only distribution to have integrated LTSP5 with Easy-LTSP GUI tool for thin client and server management.

Check out the announcement by Lars which list few more features available on the DVD and links to download iso images.

The openSUSE-Education is also in a process of moving to it’s new home on Novell Forge.

Danny Baumann announced the release of Compiz 0.7.8, Compiz Fusion project has followed up with a release of all Fusion components to match Compiz, here is the announcement by Guillaume Seguin.

The release has many bug fixes, translation updates, a new plugin obs (opacity, brightness, saturation) and the reworked Animation plugin.

The good news for KDE users is: Lubos Lunak of Kwin4 fame is working on simple-ccsm-kde4, a GUI for managing compiz settings easily in KDE4 environment.

There is still more exciting things to come in near future, a project codenamed “NOMAD”, watch out for more details as they emerge.

The repository for openSUSE Compiz packages has moved from it’s usual location X11:XGL to new home X11:Compiz so please adjust your repository settings accordingly.

The bug reports and enhancement requests welcome, head to our bug tracker.

Edit: In case there is problem after update, please make sure you have packages from X11:Compiz repo and not the old one. Discable compiz. remove all old settings  (rm ~/.config/compiz*), and re-enable it from simple-ccsm.

As is the tradition, all geeks must have a fleet of flying machines, here is mine

Hello Community

I am happy to announce the release of KIWI-LTSP 0.5.0. This time around there is a big version bump as I now consider LTSP5 implementation on openSUSE production ready. Now you can boot up your entire lab with openSUSE with all Education goodies without having to touch any of the client’s hard disks.

Release Notes:

* Based on KIWI v2.75
This fixes one critical bug that prevented low end hardwares like LTSP 150 from booting, now they  should work
* LTSP packages are the latest snapshot of today(080912).
LTSP 5.1.24
LTSPFS/D 0.5.4
LDM2-2.0.12 with a patch from Ryan Niebur for fixing input box location
* New volume control variables from Warren and Gadi. Enable sound volume setting variables from LTSP-4.2. VOLUME, HEADPHONE_VOLUME, PCM_VOLUME, CD_VOLUME, FRONT_VOLUME. Set values higher than default if not specified in lts.conf. MIC_VOLUME not set by default, but can be controlled by /srv/tftpboot/KIWI/lts.conf.
* xrexec script is renamed as ltsp-localapps, so to launch firefox run: “ltsp-localapps /usr/bin/firefox”[1]

Check out the video here for installation instructions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCDfnImh67E

To update from already installed prebuilt image run these commands as root:

zypper refresh
zypper up -t package -r openSUSE:Tools
zypper up -t package -r server:ltsp

That should update the images provided the repositories are named as above.

More complete information see here: http://en.opensuse.org/Category:LTSP

As always, feedback welcome, our bug tracker is here: http://devzilla.novell.com/kiwi-ltsp/, if you need any live help drop into #ltsp (for ltsp only) or #kiwi-ltsp(for anything related to kiwi-ltsp), I’ll be happy to help if around.

Have a lot of fun…

Yesterday Novell announced an offer for “Desktop Multiplier” that enables educational institutions to use single PC, attach up to 10 monitors, keyboards and mice to it to get “multiplied” SLED. It uses the technology by Omni Technology. Give it a try to find out what it can do, trial version available for download from here.

Novell also is a leading enterprise thin client solutions provider, it has special working relations with Wyse  and  others.

I believe KIWI-LTSP - LTSP5 implementation on openSUSE using the same KIWI imaging technology used on the enterprise products completes the portfolio making SUSE the best choice for thin client computing deployments. So if you are a school that is looking for a free solution today, KIWI-LTSP is for you, if you want a fully supported enterprise products SUSE can fulfill those needs too.

Introducing easy-kiwi-build, a tool to create openSUSE Live CD or deploy it on USB stick easily. Jan Weber would be doing a GUI to complement this utility soon.

KIWI is system imaging toolkit created by  Marcus Schäfer (SaX2), it is also the engine behind http://studio.suse.com and LTSP5 implementation on openSUSE. Instructions to build images using KIWI were little complicated for everyday users, so hopefully this will make it much simpler.

Here is how it works:

* Install required packges:

Or via command line:

zypper ar  http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tools/openSUSE_11.0 openSUSE:Tools

zypper ar  http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cyberorg:/kiwi/openSUSE_11.0 home:cyberorg:kiwi

zypper refresh

zypper in easy-kiwi-build

zypper up -t package -r  openSUSE:Tools # Always make sure kiwi packages are up to date.

* Build your own Live CD or deploy it on USB stick

1. Select the image you want to build in /etc/sysconfig/kiwi-build, choices such as :example, kde3, kde4 and gnome are available.

2. Mount openSUSE 11.0 DVD  at /mnt/11.0, this will be used as installation source of all the packages in the image.

3. Run as root: kiwi-build-image -cd (to build Live CD) or kiwi-build-image -u (for USB, keep USB stick plugged in when running this)

The example image is lightweight openSUSE with FVWM and few basic applications such as Firefox and Xterm installed. The kde3 image is created by Carlos Goncalves, and gnome as well as kde4 by Stephan Kulow. Most of these images create installable live CD. There is also an icecream image  which can be used to turn other computers in your network in to a Icecream build farm nodes.

If you want to add more packages to the image add a space separated list of packages in this file:

/usr/share/kiwi/image/yourselectedimage/suse-11.0/additional_apps

Create the file if it does not exist. To install packages not available in the DVD, download the rpm packages and put them in this folder:

/usr/share/kiwi/extra-packages-repo/

A GUI would definitly help with this part.

Have a lot of fun with it, you can send in your own custom images you want to share with others to include in this package.

As a follow up of last week’s project, here is the live CD iso of Sugared openSUSE 11.0, it will give you a rough idea about what Sugar project look like.

Consider it of alpha quality, a lot of things need fixing in this live version.

Enjoy!