sdziallas talks

C'est La Vie: chapter 2, being late. a sugar spin.

2008-12-27T21:24:53Z

Well, I hope everybody has a good time over the holidays, as I'm a bit late with my "Merry Christmas" post. But nevertheless, this post is about an announcement I should have done a week or so ago.

As some of you may (and some not) have noticed, there's is new version of the Fedora Sugar Spin around. So what's the cool new stuff we're propagating?

We're now basing the spin on F10 + the latest updates (at the date of composing the image).
There's a whole bunch of new activities around, just waiting to be tried out. Make sure to give 'em a try!
An exciting technology called sugar-presence-service has been integrated. It allows a kind of connection between sugar users in their neighborhood view - Greg has an interesting blog post about it here.

You're still not convinced? Well, you might want to have a look at The Coding Studio's screenshot tour (which has been creating some time ago) to get an overview.

So what are you waiting for? You can give it a test drive by getting it from here.

Happy Holidays everybody!

C'est La Vie: chapter 1, exploring the solar system

2008-12-07T17:54:47Z

Somebody wrote recently quite a few interesting posts on his blog. Sorry, I somehow couldn't resist stealing your heading... :)

Well, Fedora 10 is out - and it's great! I'm somewhat late with this post, but nevertheless, I wanted to take the chance to make you aware of the new spins, whose availability has recently been announced.

So what do we've here? You can now finally get your hands on the first, official product for which the Fedora's Education SIG was responsable. The Education Math Spin is available for download from the spin tracker.

As the name already states, it's focussed on educational, mainly mathematical purposes and therefore contains a number of useful packages, including wxMaxima, Macaulay2, applications from the kdeedu package, and others. For more information, please consider the spins feature page.

And thanks to those, who made this possible! It has been a long way since we started working on this, and we're not yet done, but it's a beginning. If you're interested in joining our Special Interest Group, please add your name to the wiki and contact either me or e-mail directly to the mailing list.

Anyway, feedback is greatly appreciated!

Announcing Fedora Sugar Spin!

2008-10-30T21:13:40Z

Note: This has also been posted on several mailing lists, like here!

Update: Please be aware of the new location of this spin! See this for further details.

I'm proud to be announce the availability of our Fedora Sugar Spin, which incorporates the Sugar Desktop Environment on a Fedora Live CD.

So, what is this in specific? With this spin, you'll be able to run Sugar, which is developed by Sugarlabs and the desktop environment used on the OLPC, directly from a Live CD! You'll find several activities on the image including most notably...

sugar-browse - a web browsing activity based on xulrunner
sugar-write - a word processor based on abiword

...among with several other applications introducing e.g. chat support.

We, the OLPC SIG, will be importing further activities into Fedora, which might be installed using 'yum install sugar-*' at a later time.

Where can you get it? Easily, here (updated):

http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/olpc/0.82/i686/sugar-spin.iso

Here's the SHA1 checksum, just if you're interested:

f032ab45aa116c2728dcd2d676e29a5ee114fd1d sugar-spin.iso

And what if you wanted to put it quickly onto your USB Key? Even easier! You'll just need to grab Luke Macken's liveusb-creator, which already includes support for the Sugar Spin. Here's the link:

https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/i/liveusb-creator/liveusb-creator-3.0.zip

Update: It still contains the old link; we're working on getting this fixed, but until then you'll need to download the image manually from the location above.

Thank you everybody, who made this possible!

What's going on in Education & OLPC SIG?

2008-10-20T18:54:28Z

The headline already states it, here is a quick status report.

It has been quite calm in the Education SIG for some time now, that's a matter of fact. The question is how to improve the situation there. I'm not going to give another blog post like this one here about three months ago. So I had a talk with Rex, and here are the results:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-education-list/2008-October/msg00000.html

In fact, this is a post to the mailing list I sent out a few minutes ago to the fedora-education-list with some proposals, how to move onwards.

I still need to point out, that we really need your feedback! Please talk to us and do not fear to contact me directly about any ideas or thoughts you may have.

On the other hand, there is the OLPC SIG with the "Fedora on XO" testing effort, one of its main topics. I'm also continuing to rebuild images of a sugar-based spin, and will keep you posted about updates on both efforts and SIGs.

...upcoming Fedora Education Meeting

2008-09-25T19:01:47Z

Next meeting tomorrow, 26th September, 1630 UTC (should be 1230 eastern US time) on #fedora-edu?! If you're interested, come on in and join us.

finally... releasing an Education Spin

2008-09-10T05:13:51Z

Ladies and Gentlemen, please start your engines...

I'm happy to announce that we've another Education Spin ready for download! It's not official, though: We've got trademark approval, but please consider this only a preview for the upcoming F10 spins.

The Fedora 10 Education Math Spin will follow Fedora's release cycle and will be officially endorsed by the Fedora Project.

But if you want to give it a test drive, here you go! It currently includes only educational applications related to the field of mathematics, but I'd be glad to hear your suggestions and ideas on what we've done so far.

Finally, I'd like to thank Rex for all his efforts, without which this wouldn't have been possible!

So here's the link (currently torrent only): http://rdieter.fedorapeople.org/torrents/livecd-f9-education-math-i686-200809081518.torrent

By the way: If you're interested in education, why don't you join our IRC channel? It's #fedora-edu on Freenode!

HowTo: renew your school's computer environment

2008-08-29T13:50:45Z

...or: Fedora in Education - a true story

In the last weeks, I've been working on a software solution "based on Fedora" for my school. To give you a rough overview, I'll try to sum the most important facts up. Please note that this is just a report and not an announcement of a new product or so ;).

For now, I've been propagating a switch from proprietary software to open source solutions, but currently, there're several clients around, among with a windows terminal server. Since we wouldn't be able to accomplish larger changes (also due to political concerns), we decided to stick with the latter one, but try to give some linux-based clients a test run.

So I hurried up, created kickstarts, pondered about space management and stuff like an intelligent distribution strategy. Later, I also came across our school's webpage, which also seems to need more than a quick check-up - but later more on this.

Let me draw up, what I'm imagining for now: The clients would be based on Fedora (currently on F9, but I'm working on rebasing them for Rawhide / F10) and include a number of education and office applications. The connection to the terminal server would be established using tsclient (there is a new version in rawhide - looks good!) and will be followed by the usual suspects:

an office suite (openoffice.org)
a web browser (firefox)
a flash implementation
a bunch of education apps (kdeedu)
a photo viewer (eog)
a document viewer (evince)
a media player (totem)
a lockdown editor (pessulus)
a graphics program (inkscape)

On the other hand, this image also needs to be deployed - therefore, we'll be using a CentOS server, which should then include applications like:

spacewalk (for system management)
cobbler (for deployment)
func (for network controlling)

The first one also needs Oracle XE as a dependency, but you can get this one from Oracle. We'd then use cobbler for system deployment (using kickstart files) and spacewalk to manage them from the web interface.

For the webpage, I still need to get an idea, of which CMS to use... so far, Drupal, Joomla and SilverStripe had appeared on my screen. But these are just the ones I came across recently.

Those were just some of my ideas, but this seems to be an example, how Fedora can be used for educational purposes: We're going to propagate the software - once we managed to install it completely - to the people in the school, so that e.g. more educational apps get used by the teachers.

If you've any ideas or maybe a suggestion concering a CMS, please come up with it! :)

Status Report on Fedora Education

2008-08-24T10:35:15Z

Since it has been somewhat calm for some time here, I felt it would be time for another status update, on what is currently going on in the Fedora Education efforts.

First of all, I wanted to thank Jeremy, Jordan and Rahul for their replies and the warm words on my last post. There hasn't been a large response, though. Work will continue and we'll see, how this evolves. I'll keep you posted.

There has been a kind of progress on the Fedora Education Math spin in the last time, even if we weren't able to do some things due to the infrastructure downtime (by the way: thank you all, who were involved in resolving these issues - I believe you're doing great work!). For example, we got the spin approved by all necessary bodies - Spin SIG, Board, Rel-Eng - and have now a feature page. There are still some things, which need to be fixed on this page, but I'm going to work on this soonish (sorry, I was recently somehow short of time). Hopefully, we'll be able to have a preview of the spin ready in the next weeks.

I've also been working with Greg DeKoenigsberg and Jim Gettys and getting Fedora on the XO. This is one of the projects, which had been started after the foundation of the OLPC SIG. We're not yet ready, but there is also Daniel Drake's effort to make Fedora run from a SD card on the XO. Please see his blog post for further details.

So far, the news... seems to be again the place to invite the interested ones of you to join the Fedora Education (we've now also an IRC channel - just head over to #fedora-edu and join us!) and the OLPC SIG. Come, get on board!

Fedora EDU: So what?

2008-07-31T14:04:15Z

"I believe the children are our future" -- Greg DeKoenigsberg

Greg was writing this almost two month ago in his blog. I agree with him. In that time, there was... very few development taking place in the Education SIG. When I founded the SIG, I was hoping for a kind of initial push, to get people interested in joining and maybe later in contributing to the SIG. Well, it turned out, that I was somewhat optimistic. There were some people posting around on the mailing list, but that was it. It became calmer and calmer, and right now, the SIG itself is in a disastrous state - I don't know the real reason for this, because if I knew, I'd have tried to fix it. It might well be that I, myself, also made mistakes. Sure, everybody makes mistakes - that's why we're humans. I'm not going to deny any of them here. I'm also not going to blame anyone, so please don't feel offended, this is really not my intention; I just really want and need to bring this topic to the surface. The whole thing might also sound somwhat exaggerated to you, but that's really not the way it is! Have a look at the mailing list archive - it's very, very calm.

When Greg posted this statement above, this was already the case. But since then, almost nothing has neither changed nor improved. Work has continued and there were some great surprises, but still: Right now, it's mostly Rex (a huge thank you here!) and me doing the work in the Education SIG - but this might look completely different in the various other educational efforts. It's just sometimes very frustrating... I'm posting to the mailing list, asking for opinions, announcing a meeting, but there comes nothing back! I'm far away for running away - therefore, I'm just not ready. But I'd really appreciate a kind of hint, that the people, who are interested in this topic, if they exist, are still alive. Maybe, we just need a heavy restructuring for all this - right now, there're vacations over here, so let me get another cup of coffee... I'll think about it.

On the other hand, there appeared also the OLPC SIG. Greg did a great job (another huge thank you here!) and I'm joining him and all the others in their efforts concerning the OLPC and the Fedora projects. But I'm also dreaming of a kind of joint project of all those efforts in Fedora related to education (OLPC SIG, K12LTSP, Education SIG)... more to come! By the way: Fedora Education Math Spin preview release is close...

"People never change. Seasons change, but people don't change." -- Bruce Willis as Jack Mosley in 16 Blocks

Fedora EDU: We're making Progress!

2008-07-24T14:41:03Z

Note: This is the short-cut of my recent announcement on fedora-education-list. Please refer to this post here.

I wanted to give you some kind of update (including announcements), what is happening here right now, as well as in other efforts related to education.

1. Foundation of the Fedora OLPC SIG (has already been covered here)

2. Lets move to some of our internal topics: I would like to announce a new meeting for...

tomorrow, Friday, July 25 at 1800 UTC on #fedora-meeting

If you're interested, please join us there. Further information can be found here.

3. Our Fedora Education Math Spin... there are also some news concerning this topic!

Finally, we moved away from our former plans to release a spin for F9. We're now focused on publishing a spin for F10. But that doesn't mean, that you'll have to wait until the final release of Fedora 10!

The spin (or more specifically the kickstart file) is already in the GIT repository. If you want to have a look at it, any suggestions are welcome. Here is the link:

http://git.fedoraproject.org/git/spin-kickstarts.git?p=spin-kickstarts.git;a=blob;f=fedora-livecd-education-math.ks

We're going to release a preview spin based on F10 Alpha very soon! So stay tuned... work is still in progress! :)

By the way: I created also a Feature Page for the spin, which is necessary to get it approved by FESCo later. It is located here.

Please come up with any ideas or suggestions you may have!

Thanks!

Foundation of the OLPC SIG

2008-07-21T19:36:41Z

Yeah! Here we go...

Greg DeKoenigsberg has just announced the Fedora OLPC SIG - just to say it in one word: brilliant!

The whole OLPC project is doing a great job, including the work concerning the sugar desktop environment, which is also available in Fedora. I'm looking forward to further work of the OLPC SIG and hope that we'll be for example able to produce for example a sugar based spin.

So, I hope to see you soon either on #fedora-olpc or on the fedora-olpc-list!

Pulling the Plug...

2008-07-10T17:33:40Z

We were just not ready... that might be the sum of all things we figured out today: When I announced the availability of that, what I called then the unofficial Fedora EDU Spin preview, I didn't even expect, that something like this would happen. It didn't take long for the first e-mails to arrive in my inbox, most of them criticizing the fact that we were using the external KDE-RedHat repository and trying to create a spin for Fedora 9 - all in all: It caused heavy legal / policy concerns, as well as those, related to the general approach. Finally, it had not even been up for one hour, when Rex needed to pull the plug. In my opinion, this threw us somewhat back in our progress - but we are working out a new roadmap, which could include to build a spin on Rawhide and release it later for Fedora 10. I hope all this has not caused any inconveniences, but if it has, I apologize for them. See Rex' blog post here: http://rdieter.livejournal.com/8549.html

Fedora EDU Spin Preview is LIVE!

2008-07-10T14:35:43Z

It took us some time, but finally, here it is: I'm proud to announce the availability of a first Fedora EDU spin preview!

Some of you may have already noticed Rex' post over here - thanks for producing and hosting it!

You can get it here:

In my last post, I pointed already some details out, which applications would be included. There were some minor changes, but the information provided there are still valid.

So what can you expect? Well, as I already mentioned, it is an unofficial spin using external repos, since we're including KDE 4.0.85. The educational apps are currently limited to those with a mathematical purpose due to space problems. We're going to release a final version of this spin once KDE 4.1 is in F9!

The spin hasn't been heavily tested, yet - so if you are able to do so, we'd really appreciate it. If you want to, you can drop comments and questions here, contact me directly or just post to fedora-education-list.

Again, thank you all, who made this possible!

Early Look at Fedora EDU Kickstart

2008-07-04T19:42:33Z

We're really making progress... really! It's time for an Fedora EDU kickstart file:

In a few words: This is only the kickstart file - we're currently preparing the release of a first downloadable image of the spin. I'll notify you as soon as we're able to release it! The kickstart file is located here:

And here are some technical details: This is an unofficial respin of Fedora 9! It uses the F9 repositories, but since we're planning to release the final spin, once KDE 4.1 is out, this is only a preview and therefore uses the unofficial repos at kde-redhat.sf.net.

So you know that you'll have a pre-release version of KDE 4.1 - but what else do you get? We needed to kick out quite a lot of KDE apps, since there was only limited size on the CD, but I hope that it's still usable. If you've any suggestions concerning the choice of applications, please drop a comment. On the other hand, we focussed on mathematical software - so it might even be called an educational spin for mathmatical purposes. It's just impossible to put all educational apps on a CD - and putting all of them on a DVD would have caused a highly bloated spin.

So once again: We're going to release a image soon, so that you don't need to build the spin on your own, unless you want to. But it's still going to be a pre-release version, since KDE 4.1 is not yet final. By the way: Thanks Rex for the ideas, the tips and finally for the work on the KDE preview spin here, which helped a lot to reduce the amount of useless packages!

I'll keep you posted.

Update 2008-07-05: Thanks to Kevin's comment, I was able to upload an updated version of the kickstart file... the link stays the same.

Further Progress on Fedora EDU

2008-06-29T15:42:41Z

After having published this post, some changes happened: Thanks to Rex' work, this bug is now closed and we've a kdeedu-math package in rawhide! Currently, we're preparing a kickstart file, which is roughly based on this proposal here for Fedora 9. We've also talked about the possibility of releasing an early preview (e.g. based on KDE 4.1 Beta 2) before the final version is out. But we've run into some space problems and we're figuring this out right now. So stay tuned - I'll keep you posted on further news.