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.

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!

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.

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