linkat 3.0 beta 2

The beta 2 for the linkat 3.0 has been released. Linkat is an education distribution based on openSUSE and openSUSE edu . Linkat is the distribution that the Education Ministry of Catalunya (Spain) is installing on different schools and, a part from the education software, it has some default values for installing linkat 3.0 as a server, a client, or a standalone. Moreover, once installed, LTPS can be configured. You can download a copy from:

ftp://ftp.grn.es/mirrors/linkat/3.0/

I have developed some YaST modules for this project, made some rpms, and set up an update repository.

update forecast for opensuse: milestone 0.1

Update forecast has reached milestone 0.1!

Update forecast is a project for creating a prediction model for openSUSE updates, extensible to any distribution updates, so we can have a prediction of how many updates will come. That is a research project and we do not know whether there is such a model, but for sure the work will be worth it and we'll learn a lot.

This first milestone was to study the openSUSE 11.0 updates and for doing so we implemented a small java application that parses the updateinfo.xml file, the file that has the information of the publication of the updates. As a result, we wrote a white paper that was presented at the Free Software Conference in Barcelona (http://www.jornadespl.org) last week.

You can download the code and the white paper from sourceforge: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/updateforecast .

You can download the presentation from http://www.jornadespl.org/biblioteca/viii-jornades/xerrades-curtes/model-predictiu-dactualitzacions-software

This project is being sponsored by the Ministry of Industry Science and Technology of the Spain, the European Union, ITechGrup and A65.cat.

openSUSE Factory open

This new is some days old but haven't checkout the news for a while:

http://news.opensuse.org/2009/06/18/opensuse-factory-is-now-open/

openSUSE Factory is open! That means that people outside Novell will have a chance to real participate on the openSUSE distribution. That is GREAT news!

I've seen there is some discussion around it motivated by fear. Fear that people will contribute garbage... Well, I think there are really good programmers on different opensource projects and not all of them are Novell employees. People will be given commit privileges by merit, as it is done on the most important opensource communities.

Congratulations to openSUSE and the people who took this decision.

By the way, to those who think only Novell employees should commit to the distribution because of Quality, use SLES, that is a distribution that is reviewed by Novell, certified, etc.

eyeOS Web Desktop appliance

What to say about eyeOS? It is a Web desktop, that is, a desktop that can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection and a browser. No VNC or FreeNX trick. It is almost everything javascript (and a few php).

With eyeOS you have an online text processing, spreadsheet, presentation, calendar, contactes, pdf reader, mp3 player, video player, ... and more!

There is a demo online at http://eyeos.info/ as well as some eyeos private server hosting.

Now, you have also an appliance created with SUSE Studio you can run on your computer. Download it from:

http://lin.cat/Web_Desktop_eyeOS_appliance.i686-0.0.1.oem.tar.gz

Login with user tux and password linux and follow the instructions.

Traffic shaper appliance for trying web applications on slow connections

Are you a web application programer? If so, did you ever wanted to try out a web application you have worked on and see how it would react on a slow connection?

If so, you maybe had looked at tc, a command line utility for linux that shapes your traffic queues.

Daniel Massaguer has looked at that and I helped him create an appliance for that:

http://www.lin.cat/TrafficShaper_router-1.0.2.vmx.tar.gz

It is a linux router and it includes the tc preconfigured as a 1MB ADSL connection and it also outputs nice graphs on that.

But hold on, you need also a client that connects to the router. No problem, he has also done this:

http://www.lin.cat/Traffic_Shaper_client-1.0.2.vmx.tar.gz

It is an appliance that includes firefox and konqueror so you can connect to the web application you want to try.

This way you can try your web applications and see how they will look like on a 1MB ADSL.

Interesting, uh?

This appliances are vmware appliances, so all you need is a vmware server/player, that you can download from free from vmware.com.

If you want to know more about it, how to install them and how they were implemented, download the white paper from:

http://www.lin.cat/trafficShaper.pdf

By the way, they were build with SUSE Studio.