I am happy to announce the availability of KIWI-LTSP 0.7.0,  LTSP5 implementation on openSUSE 11.1 using KIWI imaging technology.

Here are the highlights of this update:

* We now have full Nomad support, including local sound, USB/CD/DVD.
* All LTSP components updated to bzr snapshot of 090128.
* LDM now offers password prompt immediately if wrong password is given.

This update is thanks to all the hard work by LTSP Team and for working on getting nomad support in LDM: Proj-Uron team.

To install this release you need openSUSE 11.1 installed, follow the Quick_Start guide or see this link.

On the initiative of Ankit Nevatia, currently a Master in Computer Applications student at G H Patel P G Department of Computer Science & Technology(GDCST), and alumni of C P Patel & F H Shah Commerce College(CFCC) we had workshops at these institutions on 23 Jan .

I enjoyed both the sessions, especially with the MCA and Bio-Informatics students of GDCST college, they were bright and quite receptive to the technologies that were presented to them. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Head of the Department Professor Dr D B Choksi was a recepiant of Young Indian Scientist Award and Mr J V Smart, a Lecturer there was pursuing a PhD: developing a new knowledge based programming language, no surprise that the students were quite smart too

I also liked the enthusiasm and welcoming spirit of Ms Mona Joshi from CFCC who co-ordinated the workshop there.

Hope the students had as much fun as I did

Last three days(24 - 26 Jan 09) we’ve been busy with Baroda “Information Technology” Association exhibition.

After not getting any reply from Novell and being allocated stall almost at the end of the show, I had canceled the booking, luckily, Denish Makadiya, a glass fibre manufacturer by profession and passionate believer in open source philosophy got in touch with me with a great news that he had a stall booked little upstream and wishes to promote Free Software

Here are few pictures from the show:

BITA09

We distributed tons of openSUSE, Mint, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora DVDs/CDs. Akash, Priyanka, Jinita - the MSU BCA proj-uron students team, Kishorbhai, Chiragbhai and Denishbhai’s family and Sham helped burn the disks. All the artwork was created by Biswa on Inkscape with a little help from Niyor and Shushobhita.

We also did a Linux distribution knowledge survey, some respondents got most of the answers right, while some were quite off the mark. Here is the picture of responses. Could most people’s choice of free DVD be the result of me wearing openSUSE cap and a laptop running it there?

Happiness is: great weather, long bike ride listening to favourite music and Mr Geeko just happen to be in the middle of the road for me to spot.

This is the story of today, I rescued poor Mr Geeko from being run over, put him on the side of the road, and he obligingly posed for many pictures for almost an hour, click the thumbnails below for the full album

This is the first time ever for me to see live Geeko.

Wouldn’t it be nice if one of the above picture was part of openSUSE 11.2?

I, along with Kartik Mistry would be leading two workshops/presentation/sessions at Sardar Patel University colleges.

We start at 11.30 am at the G H Patel P G Department of Computer Science & Technology and 3.00 pm at the C P Patel & F H Shah Commerce College on 23 Jan 2008.

We will be showcasing the latest GUI enhancements from Compiz Fusion and KDE4 projects and various FOSS  development tools available on Linux platform.

Updated image descriptions to build openSUSE 11.1 live CD and USB images using KIWI “easily”. Presenting updated easy-kiwi-build to build openSUSE 11.1 based images:

* Install required packges:

1-click install easy-kiwi-gui

Or via command line:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tools/openSUSE_11.1 openSUSE:Tools

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cyberorg:/kiwi/openSUSE_11.1 home:cyberorg:kiwi

zypper refresh

zypper in easy-kiwi-build easy-kiwi-gui

zypper up -t package -r openSUSE:Tools # Always make sure kiwi packages are up to date.

* Build your own Live CD or deploy it on USB stick

1. Mount openSUSE 11.1 DVD/iso at /mnt/11.1, this will be used as installation source of all the packages in the image.

Run Jan Webber’s easy-kiwi-gui as root or follow the instructions below to do it manually.

2. Select the image you want to build in /etc/sysconfig/kiwi-build, choices such as :example, icecream, kde3, kde4 and gnome are available.

3. Run as root: kiwi-build-image -cd (to build Live CD) or kiwi-build-image -u (for USB, keep USB stick plugged in when running this, does not work with USB hard-disk).

Have a lot of fun…