Thanks to Rodrigo’s work, simple-ccsm now has a switch to easily enable/disable Compiz.

On openSUSE 11.0 users will not have to fiddle with any commandline, hack scripts or xorg.conf to enable Compiz. AIGLX is enabled by default on all the supported hardwares, and as soon as ATI/NVIDIA drivers are installed via 1-click, so all that is required is launch simple-ccsm (Desktop Effects) application and enable compiz.

In case you are wondering what theme I am using, it is just the default openSUSE gilouch theme, greened just the way I like it. Download and drag and drop the tarball on “Appearence” caplet if you want it too.

Here is one more of “cube” mode to make users of other OS jealous

openSUSE users grab compiz-fusion-git packages from home:cyberorg (experimental/unstable) repository. Wait till all the packages (except emerald*) are synced out to the mirrors and have the same version (080502).

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

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

Last week openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 3 was released, very early development release of what is to come in form of openSUSE 11.0 just a couple of months later.

On 11.0 release there is a plenty of choice for desktop effects, there is Compiz with all Compiz Fusion enhancements, there is KWin4 a composited window manager for KDE. To enable users to easily get their window manager of choice activated, openSUSE’s Stefan Dirsch and xorg team have worked to enable AIGLX by default on supported hardwares, and upon the installation of 1-click for binary blob drivers.

To enable Compiz, Rodrigo is working on “Desktop Effects” tab in gnome’s control-center “Appearance” caplet that would make it really easy to turn on effects. He is also working on getting something that is usable by all distributions in upstream gnome.

Compiz:

Compiz 0.7.2 in X11:XGL repo has been updated with the latest patch from Matthias Hopf which now enables to launch compiz without any startup hacks by just launching compiz –replace ccp or compiz –replace core glib gconf. So you can even use fusion-icon to launch compiz no matter what rendering method you are using (Xgl, AIGLX or nvidia native).

The home:cyberorg repo has been updated to the current git, allowing you to build experimental plugins that are not already packaged. Check out onestone’s cool new curved expo effect.

Google Summer of Code 2008:

Google Summer of Code 2008 has started, the organizations for this year have been selected, openSUSE project is one of them.

This is once in a lifetime opportunity for all the students to getinstant recognition, fame and fortune :). Only the best will be chosen for the projects from all over the world.

I along with Lars Vogdt, will be mentoring students interested in developing GUI front end for KIWI-LTSP if you are or you know anyone
in your College interested in taking up this project check out:

http://en.opensuse.org/Summer_of_Code_2008

There are other great project on offer, go through the whole list there and take up any that interests you.

See: http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code/ for information on how to go about applying for internship.

Here is the list of all organizations participating in the SoC this year: http://code.google.com/soc/2008/

Spread this news to all your friends, mailing-lists you are member of and there are even a flyers that you can put up in your institute.

To make deployment of LTSP5 on openSUSE even simpler, we now have prebuilt images available that can be deployed by following these three steps:

1. The 1-click (market speak) install of LTSP5 on openSUSE.

(115 MB image package)

If you would like to wget it, look in
http://widehat.opensuse.org/repositories/server:/ltsp/ under noarch
folder.

2. Once you have it installed, edit /etc/sysconfig/kiwi-ltsp via YaST
sysconfig editor or any text editor, fill in your network details such
as SERVER_IP(must be on the interface connected to internal network
and firewall disabled on it) and dhcp range.

3. Run kiwi-ltsp-setup -c as root to configure all the required services.

Now you should be able to boot up clients. If you have KDE4 installed on the server, try logging into that from the client.  On openSUSE 11, you would even be able to run Compiz Fusion if your thin client hardware is capable of running it

Have a lot of fun!

Yet another development milestone is released from both the projects. To keep versions in sync Compiz Fusion has skipped the release of version 0.7.0. Here is Dennis “Onestone” Kasprzyk’s Compiz release announcement and Compiz Fusion release announcement from Guillaume “iXce” Seguin.

Package versions should all read 0.7.2 (rpm -qa | grep compiz) except for compiz-emerald-themes. Give some time for mirrors to sync all packages.

Highlight of the releases:

Compiz:

  - Translation support in gtk-window-decorator.
  - Updated translations.
  - Added wrapable session functions to core. This allows to provide a full
    session save/restore in a plugin.

Compiz Fusion:

New Plugins:
 compiz-fusion-plugins-main:
  - session: Communicates with session manager to save/restore window state
  - bs: Change window brightness and saturation with key/button bindings
  - mousepoll: Provides a generic system for other plugins to get the current
    mouse position
  - mag: Provides a magnifying glass under the mouse pointer with 3 different
    display modes (simple/image overlay/fisheye)

 compiz-fusion-plugins-extra:
  - 3d: Adds depth to your desktop by raising windows in layers off the cube
  - loginout: Provides a simple system to implement login and logout animations
  - maximumize: Resizes a window to fit within the available empty screen space
  - notification: Displays error messages on the screen with libnotify
  - shelf: Shrinks a window to a preset size for monitoring many windows at once
  - showmouse: Paints particle emitters that orbit the mouse pointer to make it
    more visible

 compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported:
  - atlantis: Renders an aquarium inside of the transparent cube

Configuration manager changes:
 ccsm:
  - Action settings were split into button, key, and edge settings, each using
    its own widget.

 simple-ccsm:
  - New settings manager focused on simplicity and aimed at end users

Handy 1-click links for openSUSE 10.3 (use any one of them):

compiz-fusion-gnome - compiz-fusion-kde - compiz-fusion-emerald - compiz-fusion-devel - compiz-fusion-all

For openSUSE 11:

compiz-fusion-gnome - compiz-fusion-kde - compiz-fusion-emerald - compiz-fusion-devel - compiz-fusion-all

Compiz Updates 

Compiz and all the Compiz Fusion component has been updated to the latest git checkout. New addition is Maze plugin that will let you kill away hours trying to get a ball through a maze inside the cube.

All around improvements to various plugins and settings managers, simple-ccsm is turning out quite well.

To install click here:

Please note that you do not mix X11:XGL and home:cyberorg repositories.

openSUSE Promo DVDs

Thanks to Martin Lasarsch, the man behind the openSUSE Promo DVDs, who has sent 300 DVDs for our VGLUG, if you happen to be in Baroda or anyone you know is here, get a copy collected. These are special DVDs and differ from the ones that can be downloaded as they have GNOME and KDE Live installable and also traditional installation modes.