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

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.

THE MAHARAJA SAYAJIRAO UNIVERSITY OF BARODA

would like you to take part in

SYMPOSIUM ON OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

(SOSS08)

12-13 April 2008.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH:

VIBRANT GNU/LINUX USER GROUP

Organized by

Computer Center,
The M.S.University of Baroda,
Opp DN Hall, Pratapganj
Vadodara – 390 002.
India

I’d be giving a talks and workshops on KIWI-LTSP, LTSP5 implementation on openSUSE and various Virtualization technologies on GNU/Linux operating systems. Talks and workshops on other advanced topics by eminent trainers and solution providers from the region also scheduled.

Download Programme flyer pdf

Edit: In case you have trouble downloading from above link, use this mirror.

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!

I am happy to announce yet another milestone of KIWI-LTSP development. KIWI-LTSP is LTSP5 implementation in openSUSE using KIWI imaging technology.

Instructions to get you started are here: http://en.opensuse.org/LTSP

Installation is still as simple as 1-click to install all the required packages, one configuration file and one command kiwi-ltsp-setup -s.

Developer’s page, bug tracker, mailing lists: http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/KIWI-LTSP

We won an award in the process of working on this project http://www.efytimes.com/efytimes/24867/news.htm and http://www.openitis.com/openitis/project_view.php?id=130, this motivated me to fill up gsoc organization application..

There are tons of improvements all around. Some of the enhancements are :

* Improved performance, now clients with as little as 128M ram would be able to work.
* Image sizes are greatly reduced, resulting in less build time and low resource requirement on the client.
* New LDM theme and shiny new logo thanks to BiswajyotiM.
* New package ltsp-server that installs all the configuration files and scripts required to run on the server.
* It is now possible to select language and session from LDM (earlier ldm used nc command in stead of netcat)
* lts.conf moved out of chroot image, this will allow you to change anything that that config without having to re-create squashfs image.
* If you want any other configuration files to be served they can be put in /srv/tftpboot/KIWI and enter it in /srv/tftpboot/config.MAC(or
config.default), see /usr/share/doc/packages/kiwi/kiwi.pdf for more information.
* This is the first release that has packages built for openSUSE Factory, openSUSE 10.3 and Fedora 8. On Fedora of course you need to
use your local image building tools that Warren has been working on.
* Couple of switches are added to kiwi-ltsp-setup commandline tool tofacilitate power users to build/configure selected component.
* Local media such as USB disks and CD/DVD now automatically mount,they show up in /tmp/.$USER-ltspfs. If you want them to show up on
your desktop instead, SUID /usr/bin/lbmount.
* We now use PulseAudio for sound, everything should work out of boxwithout any configuration, however flash or any videos will suck bad.

Known Issue:

* Local hard disk does not mount for some reason
* Does not boot clients with less than 128M ram

Thank you shaefi - KIWI developer, ogra, vagrantc, gadi, warren and all the LTSP developers and captain_magnus - KIWI-LTSP co-developer.

Have fun with it, and do share your wishes and report bugs of which I am sure will be plenty.

Thanks to the beautiful work of Biswajyoti,  our “award winning” KIWI-LTSP project now has a new logo

He had earlier created KIWI logo, this logo is spin off from that. It represents a central server serving openSUSE to thin clients. A server has LTSP image created using openSUSE KIWI imaging technology.

Logo created on Inkscape, a damn good replacement for proprietary vector graphics softwares.

Hello Community

I am extremely excited to share with you the news that the project I am working on - KIWI-LTSP , is among the winners of FOSS India Award!!

http://www.efytimes.com/efytimes/24867/news.htm

Here is the project feature on the award website and the full list of nominated projects.

Thank you LINUX For You magazine and NRCFOSS (National Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software) for the award.

My heartiest congratulations to all the co-winners.

We are participating in BITA (Baroda IT Association) Exhibition 25 -27 January 2008, putting up one and only GNU/Linux and Free Software stall amongst over 100 stalls displaying hardware and software that is targeted towards M$’ OS.

When we participated last year, there was a huge interest in what ‘Linux’ is all about, visitors couldn’t believe that there is something available for free with no strings attached, it even does most of the jobs much better than paid counterparts.

To introduce visitors to Linux we had distributed Kanotix(Imprvoised Knoppix) and Sabayon Linux live CDs. This year too we will be distributing Sabayon Live CD. Here are the reasons why not PCLinuxOS, openSUSE or any other distro.

1. I wanted the distro to run Compiz Fusion out of box, PCLinuxOS did not do that, Kanotix can do it but only on Intel hardware. Sabayon is the only distro that can handle ATI/nvidia hardware and offer AIGLX or XGL as choice on booting. openSUSE live, created by KIWI, too can run compiz with Xgl but only on Intel hardware, the process is not as simple as it is on Sabayon.

2. Play multimedia- openSUSE was limited to playing MP3 only.

3. Sabayon provides the glimpse of what Linux distros could be if they are not crippled by legalities.

Once users ’see’ what a great thing GNU/Linux OS is, I am sure they would want it installed on their machines, installation of openSUSE is free, all they need to do is bring their box at our office , multimedia, drivers etc. are just 1-click away on installed system

Hopefully this year we will see open source drivers for ATI and openSUSE 11 with all the bling enabled by default.