I’d be presenting KIWI-LTSP at this year’s mukt.in. The event is at Osmania University, Hyderabad, India between 1 - 3 August.

Thanks to Novell, some lucky participants to my talk would take home this Novell/SUSE swag(I feel sorry for the trees).

Now you know where to find me later this week if you want to know more about LTSP5 implementation on openSUSE, talk about Compiz Fusion or cool stuff happening at the openSUSE project.

You may all be aware that LTSP Hackfest is going on at Portland, Oregon, USA.

Upstream developers are all working hard on the core of LTSP5, as I could not go there and participate directly, I worked on new delivery mechanisms of this great product.

Ever wanted to skip the PXE boot process and wished you could boot ltsp client locally and connect to the server?

Here are the changes since the last release that makes it possible:

- KIWI-LTSP now supports Live CD creation
Run “kiwi-ltsp-setup -cd”  to create a LTSP5 client live CD iso. The image will be created in /tmp/kiwi-ltsp-cd folder.

- USB key LTSP5 client support
Plug in the usb stick and..
run “kiwi-ltsp-setup -u” this will create an image and once the process is complete will offer you with a prompt to enter device path
to the stick (/dev/sdc), enter that path if it is correct. Your USB still would be ready in few minutes.

Currently the Live CD client image will work only with the server where the images were created. To make USB stick work with other LTSP5 server (Ubuntu/Fedora/Debian/Alt etc) copy ssh_known_host from the server into the stick’s /etc/ssh folder.

Follow the instructions here to do 1-click install and do basic configuration in /etc/sysconfig/kiwi-ltsp before running the above
commands. You will also need openSUSE 11.0 32bit DVD5 as installation source.

The X server technology that gave us Compiz, resulting possibly in inspiration of KDE4’s kwin effects - Xgl is no more. Xgl will also not be shipped on openSUSE 11.1 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.

So what would be in openSUSE 11.1 instead? AIGLX along with DRI2 will provide framework for the next generation of composite desktop effects. Nvidia drivers do not need either Xgl or AIGLX, now that Matthias Hopf’s hand is almost fixed, hopefully we will have open source ATI radeonhd drivers with 3D capability in time for 11.0

OSCON 2008 is happening 21-25 July in Portland, Oregon, USA. Jakob Perry and his team would be participating, you can get personal with LTSP5 on openSUSE 11.0 at the Linuxfest North-West booth(possibly running Compiz Fusion on the clients).

Freegeek is hosting this year’s LTSP Hackfest in Portland between July 25-27, 2008, hopefully Japerry’s team would be part of that event too.

In other KIWI-LTSP news, thanks to Lars we now have first packages of Easy-LTSP, the Google Summer of Code project in openSUSE Build Service repository. The packages are available for all current openSUSE, SLE10 and Fedora 9. Easy-LTSP would make creating and managing LTSP servers  “easy”.

We had our weekly IRC meeting  for the SOC project, Jan Weber has posted the transcript and minutes here. Thanks JPR for helping Jan out.

Just finished mid-term evaluation of the Easy-LTSP, openSUSE’s Google Summer of Code project.

The project is doing quite well, although Jan does not engage the community by posting on ML, discussing with users and developers on the IRC frequently as much as I would have liked, he has done a remarkable job in such a short time.

Everything is fully automated and no manual configuration is required in most cases in LTSP5 environment, but when you need to change something, the easy way to do any of the “tasks” required by users was missing. Not anymore with Easy-LTSP GUI

Here is how it looks at the moment, click on the image to see the full gallery:

Here is Jan’s blog, where you will find more details about all the cool things that is being done on the project.

Look at this picture closely:

The reason why this image is awesome because it is EEPC running openSUSE 11.0 KDE4 without being installed on it’s disk. It is pxebooted EEPC from the openSUSE KIWI-LTSP server.

So if you want to try out how 11.0 looks like on your little toy you can safely network boot to get openSUSE or just do normal boot to get back to the OS on the disk. No modification is made to the local disk.

Asmo has even made a video of the booting. Note that the sound and local USB disk isstill working as if the OS is running from the disk.

…some useful some not so, these are the new plugins available in compiz-fusion-plugins-git packages from openSUSE Build Service repository.

Grid:

This might become quite useful for wide screen users, use ctrl+alt+numberpad keys to quickly resize and position any window anywhere on screen, no more mouse move/resize.

ADDialog:

This plugin dims the parent window which has a dialog box open, helps spoting application that have open dialogs.

Elements:

Love burning your GPU/CPU cycles for eye-candy floating on the desktop? this is the plugin for you.

CubeModel:

This new plugin allows you to easily put any blender 3D model (.obj)  inside the cube.

Besides these additions, Freewins plugin from our one and only C-F dev/journalist SmSpillaz has improved leaps and bounds, keep up the great work. Freewins plugin allows you to rotate any window in any direction (yes including in 3D).

More details and videos demonstrating all the  cool new stuff from Compiz-Fusion world can be found here.

Note: These new plugins are in home:cyberorg repo. Do not mix packages from X11:XGL(stable) and home:cyberorg(experimental) use all packages from any one repo only.

I’ve got a new toy - iPhone, here is the first thing that I tried to do with it

Yeah, just two grainy pictures, and openSUSE is not even installed on the iPhone, but believe me it sure is just awsome to be able to use openSUSE 11.0 with all it’s compiz goodness from iPhone touch screen. Using x11vnc on openSUSE and VNsea on iPhone.

Received the shiny, sleek, black openSUSE 11.0 box with a dual layer DVD, printed manual and two stickers

It is openSUSE tradition that all the contributors receive a retail box for free, so if you want one, start participating in the project