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!

Q: Can KIWI help create a customized openSUSE with NVidia/ATI/Prop drivers and full MP3/MPEG/DVD support?

A: Absolutely you can, just add all the rpm sources in kiwi’s configuration and add the packages you need on your spin. The best part is you can create liveCD/DVD, installable media, or even virtual machine images.

Just updated kiwi-desc-ltsp to make setting up LTSP5 a bit easier.

changelog :

• Add SERVER_IP to the setup-ltsp.sh script
• Add dhcp-server and pulseaudio dep
• Add pulseaudio to the chroot required for future audio/sound integration on LTSP clients

Here are the instructions to help you set up kiwi-ltsp.

I have been trying to get LTSP 5 working on SUSE lately and the very initial test packages are up.

Download and install kiwi-desc-ltsp > 0.1.9 from HERE:

You also require kiwi, kiwi-desc-netboot and kiwi-pxeboot from HERE:

Change the installation path in

/usr/share/kiwi/image/kwltsp-suse-10.2/config.xml

from “/mnt/iso” to your installation path.

Run as root

sh /usr/share/kiwi/image/kwltsp-suse-10.2/setup-ltsp.sh

If everything goes right this script should setup /opt/ltsp/suse, /etc/exports, sshkeys and netboot images.

Follow the output on screen.

PXE booting the client should get a LTSP Display Manager through which you can log in using any account created on the server. You also require to setup dhcp and a/tftp server.

You would need ssh server running, no running X required on the server.

The real work of porting all the LTSP 5 scripts to SUSE will start now, for that I require help.

Note: Do not use it on production environment.

After trying out KIWI, I am really impressed with it’s flexibility and ease of use in creating various images such as Stephan’s KDE4 Live (which incidentally has people going nuts over it with about 30 downloads going on at a time). KIWI has made it possible for everyone to create their own distro!

This led me to think how we can extend it a bit more and help us get LTSP 5 on SUSE. LTSP 5 is currently integrated only in Debian and Ubuntu, thanks to the great work by Jammcq, Ogra, Scott and others.

We have launched an effort to get LTSP 5 on SUSE. In that quest James Tremblay called an IRC Meeting to discuss how we can go about getting this task done. Within 24 hours Marcus Schaefer, the developer of KIWI project already implemented diskless client booting off from NFS shared chroot in KIWI, this was one of the features we requested. Now that is some very quick response by a SUSE engineer to community need.

Thanks to that we now have something like very early LTSP implementation, the major task of going through all the LTSP scripts and adapting them to suite SUSE will take some time and help from anyone who would like to contribute.

So if you are a developer and can spare some time for this project look us up on IRC #opensuse-kiwi or on Factory ML.

Note: The following how-to might be obsolete by now, for more uptodate how-to please refer KIWI.pdf. Here is more recent how-to.

openSUSE KIWI toolkit is fantastic piece of work, congratulations to all the developers involved in creating this software. This is my first encounter with KIWI and I must say it rocks!

With KIWI we can build anything from live CD/DVD, thin client images, xen and other vm images to custom distributions.

Here is a short how to KIWI live, they are the things that I did to create my very first Live distro: XFCE based openSUSE 10.2.

Head to http://en.opensuse.org/LiveDVD

After installing all the required kiwi packages download this tarball. It contains modified configuration for live distro based on openSUSE 10.2. Extract the tarball anywhere, preferably in /usr/share/kiwi.

Change following parameters in config.xml according to your setup:

source path=”/mnt/iso”

Change the path to your installation source, in my case it was openSUSE-10.2 box DVD iso mounted at /mnt/iso.

package name=”whateveryouwant”

opensusePattern name=”whicheveryouwant”

For list of patterns see : http://en.opensuse.org/Patterns

Once you are done with selecting patterns and packages you want for your live distro run this command:

kiwi –root /tmp/mydvd –prepare /usr/share/kiwi/image/kwliveDVD-suse-10.2

Note: there are double hyphens in front of root and prepare)

This will take a while installing everything and will create a tree in /tmp/mydvd.

Edit /tmp/mydvd/etc/inittab to boot at runlevel 3 ( id:3:initdefault:). This was done as xdm does not offer the DE you want to log into and boots into fvwm. I am sure you can make it boot into xfce4, but I have not explored that yet.

You can customize the configuration in /tmp/mydvd as you like, like select default wallpapers, put some files on users desktop (/tmp/mydvd/home/linux/Desktop) etc. Once you are done run this command:

kiwi –create /tmp/mydvd -d /tmp

This will create an iso image /tmp/liveDVD-suse-10.2.i686-1.1.2.iso which you can burn on a disk or run directly using qemu or vmware. If you use qemu, make sure you have kqemu installed too.

qemu -m 256 -cdrom /tmp/liveDVD-suse-10.2.i686-1.1.2.iso -boot d

Once at login prompt login as user:linux, password: linux and run startxfce4