My blog is moving...

...and has found a new home. You can find it now here: http://sdziallas.com

Teachers, your input is needed.

The RIT folks rock. Mind you, they are the ones who continue to pursue the way of Greg's fabulous Math4 effort. One of them, Alex Jones, is working on making teachers' lives easier. His project is basically a question & answer mechanism, that provides results and statistics on how the class scored through the Sugar interface. Sounds cool, right? So he has a flash prototype up and running (it's a prototype and will be coded in Python once the design has been finalized) and is looking for feedback - especially from teachers. If you've got a spare minute, go, give this a try and get back to him. Thanks!

TypePad Motion coming...

...to a Fedora installation near you. Yes, that's true. TypePad Motion, that got announced earlier this month, is now in Fedora 11 and 12, as well as in EPEL 5 (testing for now). Basically, it's a microblogging platform writting in Python and based on Django. And that's how it looks like. Want to give it a try? yum install typepad-motion does the trick. Then you can directly run django-admin typepadproject mymotion --settings=motion.settings which will give you a folder called mymotion in your current directory. Switching to this folder and running python manage.py runserver should already get you an idea whether it's working. Entering http://127.0.0.1:8000 in your webbrowser is also a good idea, in case you're trying this locally. Works? Congrats! What's next? You'll need to adjust the local_settings.py file with an editor of your choice. Especially important are the OAuth credentials: There, you'll need to enter your keys & secrets for the TypePad API, which you can get here: http://www.typepad.com/account/access/api_key Finally, get the database Motion uses set up: python manage.py syncdb That's it. Now you can get your development server running again, using the command above. For more docs, developer.typepad.com is usually a good place to look, for example when it comes to customizing your Motion instance. Have fun!

Next Test Day: Sugar on a Stick [Tomorrow]

This test day will focus on Sugar Labs' Sugar on a Stick, a downstream project based on Fedora. Sugar on a Stick has launched it's first version codenamed "Strawberry" successfully in June and has recently announced the beta release of its next version. It contains basically a slightly modified version of the Sugar Desktop on a Fedora System, prepared to be deployed on USB keys. The test cases have been developed with the goal in mind to be of value for both projects, Sugar Labs and the Fedora Project. The latter one will especially profit from a better integration of the aforementioned desktop, as well as the testing of the LiveUSB technology. Additionally, new features like the rebootless live installer, which has been discussed before (and been included in Fedora lately) are also ready for testing. We invite you to jump in #fedora-test-day tomorrow, September 3, and to join the fun! More concrete information can be found in the wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-03_SoaS

SoaS v2 Beta Release - "The Next Big Thing"

Here we go! I'm pleased to announce the availability of the Sugar on a Stick v2 Beta Release. This release includes already a preview of the features of the upcoming final release, which is due to November 24 right now.

Major updates have been applied and we are now shipping the Fedora 12 Alpha base system as well as the latest Sugar 0.85.3 release. Additionally, we are now shipping the zyx-liveinstalller by default. Please download and test your version of this release from here: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-2-beta.iso 6b2a235251d545013c020ded05a8336eceff8114 soas-2-beta.iso When placing the image on your USB key, please use either liveusb-creator for Windows or livecd-iso-to-disk for Linux. We are also providing an appliance image for use with VirtualBox, as well as VMware, to allow even Mac users to test Sugar on a Stick. Later in the development cycle, SoaS will also feature specific images the XO. Finally, please note also that we are going to have a test day on SoaS together with Fedora QA this Thursday (September 3). Let us know how it goes! In case you encounter any issues, please report them at our bug tracker: https://launchpad.net/soas

Viva La Vida!

"Thanks for joining us on this Tuesday evening!" --Chris Martin

 Well, it was an awesome Tuesday evening. Coldplay was rocking the stadium of Hannover, where I went to see their show. It was just an impressive show, containing everything from Fix You to Viva La Vida and Yellow.

 So seriously, if you should get the chance to see them live, make sure to use it! Below are some pictures, too...

See the full gallery on posterous

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So I'm looking for a College now...

Entering my last year in high school here in Germany, I guess it's time to think about a college for the time after school. I've been working on the Fedora Education SIG with the goal to create a development environment for students and teachers (here's the first version, btw), to allow them to jump easily on the train of contributing to open source projects. And I'd love to continue to do so. Any recommendations college-wise?

the way we walk: linuxtag & fudcon

Day 1. Arrival. LinuxTag. FUDPub.

So there I went. Having celebrated a friends birthday the night before, I was rather tired when taking the train to Berlin. In the end, I arrived there at 10:30 am. After checking in at the hotel, I met Mathieu Bridon. Actually, that was a pretty good accident, as we two were wandering through the city of Berlin then, trying to find a way to the trade fair. In the end, we arrived at hall 7. Later, than originally expected, but we arrived.

It was great to meet all the Sugar folks - some of them I had already met a FOSDEM - again and so I spent most of the time at the Sugar booth. Later this evening, we all went to FUDPub, an event happening at en passent. Mo has some more coverage here... errr? Here!

Day 2. talks, talks and still more talks.

After a rather short night, back to LinuxTag again. Went there with Thorsten Leemhuis and some other folks. Attended Paul's keynote at FUDCon and moved after spending some time with the Fedora people on to more talks. Greg was giving an impressive talk on education and open source. Basically, there's still a lot of work to be done to spread open education. Better get started now. In the evening, Simon gave a talk showcasing Sugar, its concepts and features. He did an awesome job introducing Sugar itself, even to new users.

That night, we all went to a BBQ at c-base hosted by the Ubuntu folks. Just sitting there, talking and enjoying the time was great. We had a bunch of ideas, which were to be discussed deeply the next day.

Day 3. Hackfest. Departure.

10:00 am meeting at FUDCon. Some people were late, some weren't. We went searching a room and finally got one. And so there were Fedora and Sugar folks and the same room, discussing how to improve Sugar.

In the end, it was a very productive meeting: we set the course for the upcoming Sugar and Sugar on a Stick releases - great work everyone! :) More information to follow soonish. Eventually, in the evening, some of us went having dinner together, before I took the train back home.

Did I already say it was awesome? It was. Looking forward to meeting all of you again. For now on IRC. Then later in real life.

Strawberries for Everyone. Now.

Sugar on a Stick (v1) - codenamed Strawberry - is out and has been announced at LinuxTag. So go and get your copy now while it's still sticky! Here's the link: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Strawberry This version includes new content, as well as new activities (like Physics). Feedback is, as always, very much appreciated. Eventually, thanks to the whole team for making this possible!

Show Must Go On - SoaS for the XO-1

It's about time: You can now get a special SoaS version for your XO-1! That's cool, right? It basically means that you can now enjoy the coolest Sugar bits on a F11 base system, while stuff like power management is working again.

Well, where's the catch? It's still a preview. An early preview. So it might have some issues (please read this). And to install it, it will overwrite the XO's flash. So you should probably move important data elsewhere.

But wait, installing it - how does this work?

You'll need to grab (and put on your USB key or SD card) these two files:

http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/xoimages/devxo-1.crc
http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/xoimages/devxo-1.img

Done? Great! What's next? Just plug that in your XO and press escape before it boots. Then type in either copy-nand u:\devxo-1.img or copy-nand sd:\devxo-1.img, depending on whether you used a key or a card. That's it. It will copy the new image to the NAND and once it's finished, you can already boot it. Note that you'll obviously need to have OLPC's latest firmware and an unlocked XO for that.

So, please give this a try and let us know what you think! Fedora's OLPC mailing list, but also Sugar Labs' Devel list might be a good guess for that...

Yes We Cannes? - Yes We Did!

May 2009 in the beautiful city of Cannes: Four students and their teacher are arriving, after a one-stop flight over Zurich, at their hotel. It's hot. Really hot. What are they doing there?
 
It's the 62nd International Film Festival, which is taking place, and which we attend! It was a joint-project of the "Office Franco-Allemand pour la Jeunesse" and the "Semaine de la Critique" - a sub-section of the festival, which brought us, one of eitht groups, consisting of four high school students from France and Germany, there.
 
When we submitted the application earlier this year in our Easter break, we had never expected to be selected: everything was so far away. A week later, we gained certainty. We - Claudia, Jenny, Frauke, me and our teacher, Mr. Wilts - had been accepted.
 
And so we were watching for one week every morning a short movie, followed by the daily feature movie of the "Semaine de la Critique". Don't expect those to be "easy" movies. They're, compared to the typical movies you can see in the cinemas here, quite different. But that's also what makes them interesting.
 
So, after some discussion with the film team, as well as other groups from the project, we had one and a half hour to write a film critic. One and a half hour sounds like much time? Believe me, it isn't. The first day, we were really shocked, how fast the time went by. But we got used to it. In the end, the best critic was selected by another German group and then published on the internet. If you're interested, you can find those on www.kinema.fr.
 
Later - it was one of the last days - there was a three-hour discussion taking place, in which Frauke represented our group, as we needed to select a film for the "Prix de la (toute) jeune Critique". It became "Whisper with the Wind" - our favorite candidate.
 
Of course, we also had some free time, even though the film week kept us really busy with all its schedules and meetings. But we still enjoyed the beach, the shopping in the city, as well as some additional films, which weren't part of the "Semaine de la Critique". Anyway, we saw sometimes really remarkable movies, such as Francis Ford Coppola's new one, called "Tetro".
 
When looking back, there are all these situations, that made the time there great: it was just an unforgettable experience. We met people and found new friends. And as one of our critics, the one from Claudia and Jenny on "Ordinary People", was selected as the best German critic, we're going to meet some of them again at the Berlinale 2010. And that's what makes me smile.

See the full gallery on posterous

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A Hardware Effort: Please Help!

The Sugar on a Stick development moves on and we're now in the process of gathering and evaluating feedback. And so we need your help! You can help a lot by providing us with information on which hardware you used SoaS and how it worked out. We've been working on getting this as easy as possible, so here's how to do it:

• Grab the latest snapshot (not the beta release).
• Prepare your key and boot into SoaS.
• Go to the terminal and call as root smoltSendProfile.
• If you want to, please submit your profile URL in our wiki.

Here's the link with more detailed instructions, as well as a table, to which you can add yourself: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Hardware

New Snapshots for SoaS coming up!

Note: These snapshots are currently not being considered stable. For a more stable solution, please refer to our recent beta release. Work on SoaS continues and we have a new image based on the latest Rawhide ready. It is the first series of snapshots we are going to provide, as we approach our final release. Here is the announcement with the links.

Get it now - Sugar on a Stick

The word is out. We've recently announced the availability of our first beta release of SoaS! Now here's the press release. And the release notes.

I'm really happy with how everything evolved during the development cycle and wanted to thank all the people, who did the great work to make this possible!

You know, it's still a beta. It might have some rough edges, but we also need all your help to test it. So after you downloaded it, please give it a try and e-mail us with your thoughts. A good place to direct feedback to is for example our IAEP mailing list.

Finally, this is the direct link: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-beta.iso

We're Linux. A video.

I recently came across this impressive video, which was an entry for the "We're Linux" contest run by the Linux Foundation.
 

Posted via email from sdziallas's posterous

...grabbing the F11 EDU Beta

As the beta versions of the different spins for F11 have recently appeared here, you might want to head over and check for example our Education Spin out.

So, what do you get with it?

First of all, you get two desktop environments on the same spin. It allows you to use either...

• the Sugar desktop with all it's activities and collaborative features
• or the Xfce desktop, to which we added education related apps

So while the latter one also contains the great KDE Edu suite, you can still enjoy Sugar's fundamentally different concept by just switching the desktop. A more complete list with the included applications is located here.

If you've any questions, encountered an issue or want to join us, please jump in to #fedora-edu on Freenode or e-mail our list.

Spring is nature's way of saying "let's party!"

Finally, it's getting spring over here. Just great to sit on the patio and watch the blue sky... :)

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from sdziallas's posterous

Please Help: Updating Sugar Packages

Sugar 0.84 is scheduled for release today. Cool stuff, right? Now what we'd like to do is to to provide a stable version of Sugar on a Stick with all the latest activities and modules as soon as possible. But for that, we need your help:

Please go ahead and have your packages included, updated and built in Koji for F11 by this FRIDAY (2009/03/06)!

We've a table comparing the current versions with the ones in Fedora ready (while with the upcoming release, it might still need to be updated, though): http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Roadmap

Please make sure that the information on this page is accurate, too. Finally, if you've any suggestion for a honey activity, which we should definitely include, just add it to the wishlist there!

Thanks in advance for your help and lets make this a great release! :)

A Time Capsule - Pictures

pictures are conserving a moment of life - just like a time capsule

My good friend Frauke Lahmsen has been doing quite some photography over the time and I really believe that she has been doing a great job

And if you get a spare minute or two, please feel free to drop a comment to this post! Thanks... :)

A weekend later - SoaS!

The last weekend was quite exciting. We've a whole bunch of changes to report concerning Sugar on a Stick. So where to start?

First of all, go and grab your most recent version of SoaS from here: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/1/latest.iso

It includes all the cool new stuff we want to show to you! What's that specifially? Here and here are the two announcements. Major changes include now...

• Honey activities and overall stability improvements. Write & Speak should now work, as well as we're now including Read.
• Size improvements everywhere! The image has been slimmed quite a bit; it's just around 400 MB.

Thanks to the whole team for making this possible, including Aleksey, Frederick, Marco and Simon!

Please report any issues you may encounter! Happy testing!

Looking Back: FOSDEM 2009

It was great. It was my first FOSDEM, but it was really pretty impressive. I was able to meet quite some people I always wanted to meet and I feel that such events are sometimes just great to meet up, sit down, talk to each other and finally to gather new ideas.

So thanks a lot to all the Fedora & Sugar folks out there, who are all in all way too numerous to name... ;)

What have I been doing over the time there? Well, I was present at the Fedora booth, promoted SoaS there (please see Simon's blog post on this) and also attended Greg's and Tomeu's talks on the Sugar Environment, it's effects and new proceedings. Kudos to both of them!

You want to head for some pictures? Sure, I've put some of them on my Flickr account... and am really looking forward to the upcoming LinuxTag to meet all of you again!

Fedora EDU: A remix. And more to come.

Okay folks, we have something ready for you! It's just a preview, provided as-is, far away from being official and just intended for testing. So what is it?

You can now get an (unbranded) education remix right here: http://rdieter.fedorapeople.org/torrents/f10-education-preview-1.torrent (thanks to rdieter for setting this up!)

Why are we releasing this now? As this is still based on F10, the main purpose is to gather feedback concerning the spin for F11.

You're asking what we've on the spin? We've included more applications for educational goals than before:

You'll be able to evaluate the whole KDE Education Suite including new apps like marble or step. We're also having some graphics applications like Blender, GIMP and Inkscape around - so there's enough space for you to give full scope to your creativity. What else? You get the OpenOffice suite on the CD, as well as a great TODO list called Tasque. And you always wanted to test your brain? Nevermind, just fire gbrainy up!

These are just the most important apps, you can check out more information in the wiki.

As always, feedback is greatly appreciated, so feel free to join us in #fedora-edu on Freenode or just drop a comment on the mailing list.

Fedora EDU: Making progress. A new meeting.

Progress is underway. Yay!

We're heavily working on creating something on behalf of the EDU SIG for F11. So what's waiting for you? Well, we've done some preliminary work and also thrown a wiki page together here. So far, there're discussion going on, whether to use KDE or XFCE and which apps to include. I've also been working on various kickstart files and already compared the different options. But we want to concentrate a bit, which means... having a meeting! Why don't you join us on...

Wednesday, January 14 at 1600 UTC on #fedora-edu

Wait... that's tomorrow, right? Yep, so see you then! For the record: We also have an agenda, and would be happy to get opinions from others. This is the point where you can influence the development of an educational spin to make it fit your needs - and the one of thousands of teachers, students and pupils around the world!

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

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

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!

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?

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

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

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

...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

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?

"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!

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

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...

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!

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: [link removed]

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

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: <link removed>

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

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.

Update on Fedora EDU

I think it's time now for an status update on the Fedora Education project - what has happened so far and what needs to be done?

Well, first of all, I've set up roadmap giving you a general overview. There are further topics related to it and I want to you point you to some of them.

There are some news on the F9 spin: This bug is still open, since the KDE SIG still discusses, how to proceed with the different kdeedu sub-packages. In my talks to Rex we agreed on postponing the spin's release, since we're going to wait for KDE 4.1, which is going to include major improvements for the users. KDE 4.1 is scheduled for the end of July, so I'd expect a F9 Edu Spin release in the late August, since KDE 4.1 also needs to be included in Fedora, which should take some time.

The next point on the roadmap are two spins for F10. While we thought about using the OLPC's Sugar interface for a spin, there are currently only few activities in F9. But the OLPC guys are working on improving the situation - recently, Michael posted on FDL. So if you're able to, please help them to package the software.

For all those spins, we need kickstart files. I've already created a few some time ago (you might have a look at some ideas here), but the new ones aren't yet completely ready, while I'm still continuing to bake those images. I'm going to post them soon!

But let's move on: I've also created a request for our art team here. I think we should at least talk or think about having a special wallpaper or so for our education spins. Same here as with the OLPC stuff: If you're able to know, please speak up!

The last thing I'd like to mention is the possibility of creating a special portal on fedoraproject.org or fedorahosted.org containing educational content (e.g. concerning various applications). What do you think?

If you've any questions or just want to express your ideas and opinions, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Fedora Education

Fedora & Education... so what do we have here?

There are currently various efforts in Fedora concerning education - just think of the OLPC project or Warren Togami and other working on the LTSP stuff.

Some time ago, we announced the foundation of an education SIG. Since then, quite a lot of things changed and Fedora 9 was released...

I have recently created and announced a roadmap using some ideas on our mailing list. The topics are ordered chronologically, so that our main goal would be at the moment to get more people involved in the SIG and to release finally a first spin. Some opinions concerning the roadmap would be definitely appreciated...

Now, this seems to be the right place to invite everybody, who is interested in education to join us: Just add your name to the wiki and we would be more than happy to welcome you on the mailing list. On the other hand, even if you just have a question concerning education and Fedora, please don't hesitate to post on the list or contact me directly.

Fedora 9

Yeah, I know... I'm a little bit late. But here we go: Last Tuesday, Jesse Keating announced the availability of Fedora 9. I've been for some time on Rawhide (Fedora's development snapshot), so it was quite interesting to see some changes happen and to track the development.

For me, this is a somewhat special release, since this is the first release, I'm really involved in as a Fedora contributor. I have been a Fedora & Red Hat user for some time... it all started with a Red Hat Professional Workstation (after some tries with Debian and Knoppix - we all had Knoppix somewhen, right?). Some people also considered me as a distribution-junkie, since I tried out several distributions... but in the end, I returned to Fedora. Well, during my work practice, I got to know some new people and I was finally encouraged to start to do something - thank you Thorsten for all this :).

Currently, I'm mainly focussed on education in Fedora (you may notice some posts concerning this topic now and then here), but for example also interested in the creation of various spins - that's why I'm a member of the Education and the Spins SIG, as well as an ambassador and part of the marketing group (but I'll talk about my Fedora work later)...

But back to Fedora 9: This release brings along several new features, including innovations like the PackageKit package management system, as well as the new KDE 4 desktop environment and a beta of Firefox 3. For GNOME users, it might be interesting to notice the inclusion of the 2.22 release. On the other hand, the former open source Java version IcedTea (which belongs to Java's 1.7.0 unstable part) has been replaced by OpenJDK, which contains version 1.6.0.

Those desktop improvements stand beside with major system changes, including updates for Red Hat's installer called Anaconda - e.g., it's now capable to resize NTFS partitions. Fedora 9 also contains a preview of the Ext4 filesystem and from now on Kernel 2.6.25. It's remarkable that Fedora is one of the few distributions, which are offering kernel updates during the maintanance period.

The are also two new new features increasing the usability: The new pre-upgrade technology allows the user finally to upgrade directly from an older version to the recent release without needing to reinstall the whole system (or downloading a bunch of CDs), while another feature now includes the possibility to create easily LiveUSB media. One can download a windows executable, which allows the user to put Fedora onto a USB stick and even to create a so called persistent overlay, so that files created during the use of the live-mode won't be deleted.

All in all, Fedora 9 is IMHO a really great release, which highly increases the usability for the user. I'd recommend to try it out, but one should know, that Fedora might not be as easy to use as... openSUSE or Ubuntu (for example if you tak about the support of proprietary software).

Hello World

Hi everybody,


welcome to my personal blog. Here, I'm going to post news and thoughts concerning the Linux and especially the Fedora community, as well as those related to the so-called web 2.0. Currently, there is not really much to see here, but I hope to find the time to publish some posts from time to time.