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.

David Mikos has been busy adding tons of improvement to atlantis plugin, fishes now move in school, another cool new addition is water and waves to complete the picture of a fish tank. It would be added to git packages soon.

Obligatory screenshot:

I’ll leave other interesting stuff that is happening like stars, autumn, smackpad, cubedbus plugins and other settings tool development, for our resident journalist SmSpillaz to cover in more details.

We released KIWI-LTSP 0.3.11 with reduced initrd image size so that the diskless thin-clients(TC) with 128MB memory can now boot, we still need to massively reduce it to allow booting even 64MB TC. KIWI is rapidly developing and has improved quite a lot since last month, some of the improvements like diskless profile for the netboot image were specially added for KIWI-LTSP. To create a custom distribution based on openSUSE 10.3, including live USB/CD/DVD, check out Novell Open Audio featuring KIWI.

Hello Community

I am happy to announce another development release of KIWI-LTSP.

With this release we also got a bugzilla tracker, so make the best use of it

http://devzilla.novell.com/kiwi-ltsp/

You can now also send us your bug reports, enhancement requests,
patches etc via that, apart from IRC #ltsp or #kiwi, and these mailing
lists.

Click here to install kiwi-ltsp :

Follow the instructions here once the installation completes:
http://en.opensuse.org/LTSP

Changes from the last release:

- Synced ldm with the latest gutsy-ltsp code
- Auto mount when login in and unmount during log off fixed
- Sound works out of box

Known Issues:

- If the local device has NTFS partition, hit CTRL+C when it is being
mounted to continue, will add ntfs support later.
- Some hardware may face X configuration issue, screen will go blank
and stay blank, hit CTRL+C to continue.

Have a lot of fun!

A dedicated teams of translators have been steadily getting all the compiz tools translated in their languages, recently Portuguese became the first team to complete 100% translation.

Here is the graphical presentation of top 30 languages(Click image to see full list).

If you are interested in contributing have a look at this page and join/start your own language team, you wouldn’t want your language below top 30 now, would you?

On another front, it was great to see KIWI-LTSP on the openSUSE news. I also announced release of another milestone which included 1-click install, auto mounting of local disks, auto sound configuration and many other small improvements. I am sure deploying of LTSP5 on openSUSE is now as easy as it can get. Testing it on all kinds of client hardware would be very welcome, client can be any old PC that is capable of PXE booting.

There are some bugs though, which I have no idea how to fix, like auto unmount, logout does not return to LDM, stale processes left on the server even when the client is switched off. Hopefully captain_maGNUs would be able to track those down soon

After quietly plugging away trying to get LTSP5 fully running on openSUSE, we have a latest team member join us: Magnus “captain_magnus” Boman. This has given a substantial push to our efforts.

We also put up a wiki for developers with current status and TODO: http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/KIWI-LTSP

As can be seen on the status page, we have a working setup ready, and hopefully more work would make it a bit more useful by openSUSE 10.3 release next month.

PS: We are still looking forward to more developers joining us, so if you are interested, look us up on IRC freenode #kiwi.

Here is a step-by-step ‘how to create your own isoboot, vmxboot, xenboot or usbboot images’ on openSUSE 10.3 Beta1.

1. What you require installed on your system:

kiwi-pxeboot
kiwi-desc-vmxboot
kiwi-desc-xennetboot
kiwi-desc-netboot
kiwi >= 1.49
kiwi-desc-livesystem
kiwi-desc-isoboot
kiwi-desc-usbboot
kiwi-desc-xenboot

2. Download Beta1 i386 DVD iso, you can choose to use internet repository if you got good bandwidth (skip step 3 if using internet repo)

3. Download the following RPM and put it in any folder e.g., /home/cyberorg/kiwiextra

squashfs
squashfs-kmp-default
aufs
aufs-kmp-default

suse-live-installer

4. Download these config files extract, rename to config.xml and copy them to their respective location:

/usr/share/kiwi/image/isoboot/suse-10.3/config.xml

/usr/share/kiwi/image/kwliveDVD-suse-10.3/config.xml

5. Edit the above two files and change your installation source repository path.

6. Run the following commands once you have installation source corrected :

kiwi –root /tmp/kwlive –prepare /usr/share/kiwi/image/kwliveDVD-suse-10.3 –logfile terminal

(Double dashes in –root, –prepare and –logfile)

If that completes successfully

kiwi -c /tmp/kwlive -d /tmp/ –logfile terminal

The above command will create a live DVD here: /tmp/liveDVD-suse-10.3.i686-1.1.2.iso

7. To test your DVD:

qemu -m 256 -cdrom /tmp/liveDVD-suse-10.3.i686-1.1.2.iso -boot d

Optionally you can run kiwi -c -t <imagetype> to create other image types.

Username, password and root password is ‘linux‘.

Result:

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.

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!