The packages in home:cyberorg (experimental) openSUSE Build Service repo has been updated with the latest code from Compiz Fusion git. Major change is Animation plugin restructuring, there are still some rough edges like compiz crashing if animation addon is enabled, so please do not use the packages on production system, only for the developers and testers to report and fix bugs.

Remove /$HOME/.config/compiz  (rm -rf ~/.config/compiz) before running compiz.

Update: Crashes due to libGLU problem is now fixed, compiz is as rock solid as before, thanks Cornelius.

Last couple of days Cristian Rodriguez and I have been working on getting OLPC XO’s Sugar interface on openSUSE. Here are the results:

Home

Browser using Hulahop, gecko/pyxpcom engine.

List of “Activities” - Sugar applications.

Write Activity - Sugared up Abiword

Color Activity

Patched for logout

Available via 1-click for openSUSE 11.0.

There is still some work to do done, WolfiR is building python-xpcom, only once that is done Browse activity will work. Use lower screen resolution as fonts are somehow very tiny on large screens.

I started working on it thinking it shouldn’t be difficult to build few rpm packages, but now I realize how much work is involved in the project. Hats off to all the developers working on the project, didn’t know they had a very helpful, active and lively community. Sugar is already available on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora of course(olpc is built onFedora).

Here is an idea, build OLPC XO’s Sugar interface for openSUSE this hackweek.

What is Sugar?

• Sugar graphical user interface, written in Python, on top of the X Window System and the Matchbox Window Manager.
  • Designed specifically for collaboration of users through network sharing of user activities (method calls and signals);
  • “Zooming” interface to network connectivity “spheres” (local, collaborators, neighborhood);
  • Journal interface to storage of events, activities, objects (files)

Why Sugar?

As sugar is designed specifically for children, getting that interface  to openSUSE would enable administrators in developing countries to run Sugar on normal desktop or on diskless workstations via KIWI-LTSP, providing the same environment available on OLPC laptops to children who have not got their XO yet.

Status:

The work is in progress, thanks to Fedora and our fantastic openSUSE Build Service, most packages required are now in one place. I could get it working on openSUSE at the end of the first day :). There is still more work to be done.

Obligatory screenie (yes it is openSUSE):

This month some of the magazines in India have openSUSE special issue, get it from the stand near you.

 This is the place I visited last weekend.

Follow this guide here to get some Icecream on your build machine( Double your build-speed with Icecream on OpenSUSE), should work for any distro you run.

Get this Live CD, insert, boot up as many Icecream nodes you need, compile and watch your builds fly. Useful for compiling tons of code or building RPM packages.

The live CD is the best way to do distributed builds if you do not want to setup KIWI-LTSP-Icecream. The CD has some rough edges, we will polish it in coming days. The CD is a result of our work on KIWI-LTSP.

More information on using Icecream is here. Which may answer questions like “why do I need Icecream?”.

Did I mention KIWI Rocks!!?

Got inspired by MMeeks’ post about Icecream on openSUSE. So here is how you can quickly create a build cluster using KIWI-LTSP and Icecream without installing anything at all in the PCs of colleagues who are out for lunch, in fact we don’t even boot into the OS installed on their PC, hopefully by the time they are back your build is complete, they can get back to their usual business(playing solitaire or whatever..).

Thanks to all the hard work done by the developers at the LTSP hackfest we now have local apps support out of box.

KIWI-LTSP 0.4.4 has these additional features apart from live USB/CD client images:

- Firefox installed in the client chroot so the more resource intensive load can be run using clients hardware.
To launch local firefox, run “xrexec /usr/bin/firefox”

- Improved kiwi-ltsp-bootimages package with eepc support fixed

I am happy to also share that Easy-LTSP - GUI tool for managing ltsp is now almost complete, packages for openSUSE and Fedora are already available, we need someone to debianize it.

Here is the transcript of the meeting we had yesterday:
http://forgeftp.novell.com/kiwi-ltsp/ltsp-gui-meeting-08-aug.txt

More information in Easy-LTSP - openSUSE Google Summer of Code project can be found here:
http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/Easy-LTSP

We have restructured wiki to make it easier to get all the information required, check it out here for installation and other information:
http://en.opensuse.org/LTSP

Add-on iso is also available for openSUSE 11.0 if you prefer off-line installation instead of via 1-click:
http://forgeftp.novell.com/kiwi-ltsp/iso

Have a lot of fun…

This was my first visit to Hyderabad, the trip was great, it was full of ancient monuments, pearls, meeting of open source geeks, biryani and a lot of rain. I did two sessions at the event, one on openSUSE 11.0 installation and another on KIWI-LTSP. We PXE booted up the entire lab into KDE 4.1  from my laptop. Here are the slides of my talk.

I also met with a lot of students, open source enthusiast, fellow speakers from different parts of the country. Special thanks to Krish and his team for taking good care of all of us.

Click here for the entire album.

Tuxmaniac’s report.

Vidya’s report

Everyones presentations