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: <a href="http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Education/images/">http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Education/images/</a> 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: <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/VMware">http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/VMware</a> 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 <a href="http://www.nubae.com">www.nubae.com</a>