[IAEP] Sugar on suse and virtualised appliances to cheat network connectivity

[David Van Assche]

So, this Sunday marks a special day for us openSUSE folks, as we've now
managed to get pretty much every activity behaving, including the underlying
journaling and collaboration. We've got more than 50 activities packaged and
included in the live cd/usb/dvd/virtual appliance. By using the incredible
flexibility and power that oBS gives us, with just 2 people working on this
project, we've managed move forwards fast and efficiently. So we are proud
to announce that you can download the latest releases here:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Education/images/

As you can see, the main directory contains .vmdk virtual appliances which
have been tested to run on both Vitualbox (Sun's free virtual container
system) as well as vmware and its host of virtualisation software.
Advantages to running an appliance include bypassing wireless/wired network
card drivers as the host can really be running pretty much anything from OSX
to Windows. This will also be a way to get Sugar running on any Mac
regardless, and pretty much and hardware. Its also a good way to run sugar
on ed/ubuntu and debian based systems. Though a tad slower than on a native
system (running without virtualisation), the advantages clearly outweigh the
disadvantages. In the iso subdirectory you can find pure sugar or the full
openSUSE-edu suite, containing a good 2.4 gigs of educational material
including an icon to launch sugar directly from the desktop, a live LTSP
system, iTalc, and a host of other interesting software. For more
information on virtualisation, vmware, virtualbox and how to get sugar
working within these environments have a look here:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/VMware

Currently the only application not running is Read, which requires some
updated GDK stuff from gnome 2.26, which is currently not entirely working
with Sugar on openSUSE, but within the next weeks we should be able to
resolve this. We are searching for more activities to include, as well as,
seeing what we can do artistically at the different stages such as booting
up, session manager, etc. Currently we automatically get the system to join
the sugarlabs ejabberd server for collaboration, and after testing quite a
few applications we can confidently say this works quite well. So its nice
to see openSUSE being one of the more advanced Sugar environments now...
seeing as a couple of weeks ago we had a very broken environment

kind Regards,
David Van Assche
www.nubae.com
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