Do you run a network of more than few computers(educational institutions/enterprise) and wished you did not have to install OS/applications on the clients?  Have you faced hardware failure on PC, lost data or time when users sit and do nothing while the replacement PC is found? Tired of tracking various online updates, software licenses on multiple PC?

If you answered yes to most of the above, KIWI-LTSP is for you.

Install openSUSE 11.0 on one powerful PC (any PC 2Ghz and above with 2GB RAM), do a 1-click install of kiwi-ltsp-prebuilt image, if the server IP is 10.0.0.254, just run kiwi-ltsp-setup -c command as root, in few seconds your LTSP5 server is ready.

You would now be able to network boot upto 20 PC (any PXE capable PC with minimum 128M-256M RAM) without any modification or installation on the client side.

All the users that wanted to try new openSUSE 11.0 but were not ready to remove the installed OS can now just network boot to use openSUSE 11.0 and reboot normally into their installed OS without any change to their hard disk. They get to enjoy all the software goodies installed on the server. Sound, printer and scanner should work without any problem too. If they have hardware with nice open source 3D drivers get Compiz Fusion as a bonus.

As all users’ data is stored on the server, backup and restoration is much easier. Routine maintenance is required for only one PC, users can log in with their credentials from any PC on the network, they get their desktop where ever they are. (phew! that does it for market speak)

Presenting KIWI-LTSP 0.4.0

New stuff in 0.4.0 since last release:

•  openSUSE 11.0 branding to LDM thanks to Lejo
•  Much smaller image size, down to 97M now
•  Icons for plugged in USB/CD now show up even on KDE4 desktop thanks to the work by Klausade
•  All LTSP packages are updated to latest bzr snapshot
•  LDM background image can now be changed easily.

Place your background (680×480) in /srv/tftpboot/KIWI/bg.png (do not change the name)

edit /stv/tftpboot/KIWI/config.default and add this at the end of
“CONF=” line, place a comma and continue the line:

,/KIWI/bg.png;/usr/share/ldm/themes/ldm-suse-theme/bg.png;YOURSERVERIP

To make things even easier, Jan Weber is working on Easy-LTSP - LTSP GUI for the openSUSE Google Summer of Code project.  Check out the progress on the project wiki here.

Installation instructions and other details can be found on openSUSE wiki.

We had about 20 Geekos turn up at our office on Saturday evening for the openSUSE 11.0 Launch Party. We had a presentations on new features specific to this release, discussions on promotion of Linux everywhere and of course install fest so now tons(figuratively speaking) of laptops are running openSUSE.

The last laptop is still choking on its chkdsk /f while all the rest have finished with openSUSE installation

Everyone has carried home the DVD with a promise to install it on every computer they have access to.

This is what I got my hands on yesterday, it is new revised Syllabus for 11th and 12th grade. Needless to say that I am thrilled with this news

For the uninitiate, this is the turning point we have been waiting for that would take Linux to every computer user. Imagine millions of students who are aware of what Open Source Software and Linux is before they join universities. Who in their right mind is going to use Vi$ta after trying out openSUSE 11.0 in all it’s compiz glory?

openSUSE-Education is also better placed to cater to this immediate huge demand for Linux distribution specifically tailored for education. With KIWI-LTSP the school administration does not have to worry about getting every computer installed with the OS that is required to meet this new education board’s directive. All that the computer department admins have to do is install KIWI-LTSP on one server to run as many PC they need.

Finally some sanity in our education system :))

* Release Announcement with a lot of useful information

* Sneak Peeks at Plethora of Improvements

* openSUSE 11.0 makes Compiz Fusion easy

* On Digg

openSUSE 11.0 is coming, join the party if you are in my town - Vadodara/Baroda, put yourself on this list. We’d be distributing DVDs, doing a small presentation introducing all the cool new stuff and of course have some beverages and snacks

Here is a party locator, if you cannot find the one closest to you, organize your own!!

openSUSE 11.0 just went Gold, and would be available on mirrors in 5 days, here is a handy guide to get ATI and NVIDIA drivers, use whichever way that suite you.

Or commandline friendly

su -c “OCICLI http://opensuse-community.org/ati.ymp”

su -c “OCICLI http://opensuse-community.org/nvidia.ymp”

One more commandline way via zypper:

NVIDIA:

zypper sa http://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/11.0 nvidia

zypper in x11-video-nvidiaG01

ATI:

zypper sa http://www2.ati.com/suse/11.0 ati

zypper in  x11-video-fglrxG01

No manual configuration of xorg.conf or switching on Xgl required to get compiz goodness, just launch simple-ccsm and enable compiz from there after installing the drivers.

Another neat feature in openSUSE 11.0 is that we now have a way of installing One-Click patterns via a command line (click-commandline?).

Here are a bunch of softwares you can install via 1-click or OCICLI:

Open terminal to run these commands or click on the link in web browser:

Compiz Fusion with almost everything:

su -c “OCICLI http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/XGL/openSUSE_11.0/compiz-fusion-all.ymp”

Codecs pack for Gnome:

su -c “OCICLI http://opensuse-community.org/codecs-gnome.ymp”

Codecs pack for KDE:

su -c “OCICLI http://opensuse-community.org/codecs-kde.ymp”

When NVIDIA and ATI drivers are available, they can be installed in a same way too.

Note: Quotes are necessary, make sure there is no “wordpress  effect” when you copy paste the above commands in shell.

To welcome openSUSE 11.0 that will be released later this month, Francis Giannaros and his team at http://news.opensuse.org are doing a “Sneak Peaks” at the special features that distinguish openSUSE 11.0 from other distributions. Check out the feature on Compiz in openSUSE 11.0 and an interview with Dennis “onestone” Kasprzyk, openSUSE user and Compiz Core and Compiz Fusion developer.

Couple of weeks back I posted information about a tiny usability enhancement in simple-ccsm added by Rodrigo that enables users to switch on/off Compiz effects. This time below is a PulseAudio preference(papref) application enhancement that allows setting of speaker layout on the fly.

I am sure most people wont like fiddling with config files to get multiple speaker setup working, hopefully this little enhancement would spread sweet music all around.

Check out other screenshots captured at various stages of openSUSE 11.0 development.

Our friends Dennis Kasprzyk and Guillaume Seguin announced the release of Compiz and Compiz Fusion 0.7.6 respectively. As is the tradition we always make a release with a lot of new features and of course eye-candy to go with it.

In the new features there is now a new “Static Switcher” that shows thumbnails of all the open windows and moves caret instead of thumbnails. Place plugin received a rewrite that enhances it’s multi-display support. Gtk-window-decorator is now accesessibilit(a11y) sensitive and ezoom plugin now has area zoom, helping people with disabilities to work on computer with ease.

Eye-candy? Full sphere!! I’ll let a picture talk for itself.

openSUSE users head to X11:XGL repository and use 1-click install for your distro version. Notice new openSUSE_11.0 repository